


endless wonder

by kaermorons



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Kaer Morhen is a Warehouse, M/M, Magical Artifacts, Warehouse 13 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:07:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 50,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27502774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaermorons/pseuds/kaermorons
Summary: Jaskier knows three things for sure: One, most of the items stored in Kaer Morhen actively want to kill him. Two, all of the people he works with are absolutely gorgeous, terrifying alphas that want nothing to do with his flirty omega self. Three, he wouldn't have it any other way.Oh, did he mention the end of the world?
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 212
Kudos: 323





	1. #S-27-9842-878D: Pocketwatch

The terrifying, beautiful women left him alone in the room. His room. For the...foreseeable future. Jaskier didn’t suppose there was a kind of post-career path for people working in secret, shady organizations wrapped in mystery and intrigue, but to be fair, they were all probably recruited the same way he was: Forcibly, and yet in the nicest way possible.

The room was sparse, and mildly decorated. One bed, with a deep blue set of covers, a dark purple wool blanket draped over the end. One desk with one chair, wide enough to accommodate little more than writing materials. One armchair next to one lamp positioned next to one bookshelf, with a single book placed upright, as if held up by... _ oh, we are not going down that line of speculation  _ today _ , good Pankratz.  _ The whole place had an incredible feeling of home, though, and for that, he allowed his shoulders to relax a bare inch.

“We’ll collect you at six o’clock for dinner, feel free to explore anywhere that’s not locked,” the nicer woman had said to him. There was always an unspoken  _ we’ll know, otherwise _ to her words, leaving him slightly put off for her suggestion. She’d disappeared down the hall in such a manner that told him nothing could keep her from her next appointment, elsewhere in the bed and breakfast.

The other woman, the one that didn’t smile, and didn’t bear any signs of having smiled in the past, had only looked at him with a violet-eyed intensity, like he’d been judged and found wanting. In their silent stand-off in the doorway, she’d managed to make a blink carry the same meaning and weight as a formal dismissal, and he’d shut the door before he made a fool of himself any further.

“Shit,” he muttered, approaching the wardrobe in the corner. Sure enough, bags of his things, from a flat he hadn’t packed, were waiting, innocently, at the bottom of the wardrobe. “Well, then.” Jaskier ignored the luggage for the time being, feeling vaguely like he wouldn’t find his belongings lacking, as he certainly had been to the violet-eyed woman.

He washed his face in the small water closet, and curiously peered at the door connected to the far end of the room. So he’d be sharing a space, then. He knocked on the door a few times, but no one answered. The handle didn’t budge, and rather than use his usual method of entry when faced with such a problem, he took a step back and swallowed. It was probably nothing short of a miracle he’d managed to walk away from the whole situation two days ago with nothing more than a  _ job _ to scar his name, but the extent of that good luck remained to be seen.

He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted.

* * *

Most artificers were not trained so informally as Jaskier. To be entirely fair, after age ten, most of Jaskier’s life could be described as “informal” and “lacking professionality”. A certified genius, he tired of the Royal Academy and their gross lack of imagination, and turned to stimulating himself elsewhere. So he took to the library, until he found information on artificers. The pages smelled of destiny. A healthy dose of engineering learned by photon bulbs under covers, with no small bit of art and imagination, he toured museums and was entering into creation contests before he’d even formally presented as an omega.

With his lack of formal training, his designation, and no interest in changing any of those parts of himself, he took to black-market artificing. The methods the Academy looked down upon so greatly were now his playground, and his growing collection of inventions and connections grew, along with his notoriety - the unmated omega writing songs in steam, and crafting masterpieces in copper and glass. Of course, with the amount of unofficial work he’d been doing came some rather  _ unofficial _ clients and contracts. His pockets were lined with the money from the whole Continent’s underworld, and his mouth was kept exceptionally shut at all times.

That’s not to say he didn’t have his vices. When he’d bought his workshop outright at sixteen, the first thing he’d done was to boobytrap it so well, it may as well have had a life of its own. Large, barbed nets for intruders, pressure sensors that dropped into other nets, codes and locks and tracking systems no sane man could interpret, it was all Jaskier’s design, and so unsanctioned the Academy would have keeled over from sheer shock.

That was, if the actual shock bolts didn’t hit them first.

Yet when the terrifying woman with violet eyes had shown up at his workshop, he hadn’t been ready to have his foot shoved into a pile of shit called “warehousing.”

* * *

Jaskier awoke to four sharp raps at the door, clutching his chest in shock. The light in the room had shifted, and his wrist-chronometer read that it was precisely six o’clock.  _ Right. Dinner. _

No time to fix himself in the mirror, he passed a hand over his waistcoat and trousers, the wrinkles in his sleeves too far gone to be saved now. He flung the door open.

It had been maybe five seconds between waking from his stress nap and opening the door, but nobody was there in the hall, nor walking back down the stairs to the main level. If it weren’t for the undeniable scent of something delicious on the floor below, Jaskier would have blamed his irregular sleep patterns for making up sounds where there were none.

He fiddled with his chronometer a little on the way down, setting an alarm for five minutes til six in the evening, so he wouldn’t be caught unawares again. It was this eyes-averted fiddling that made him collide with another body rounding the corner - this one, made of solid muscle, sheer power, and breathtakingly good looks.

“Oh! Shit. I didn’t see you there,” Jaskier said, flustered by his own inattention. The man who stood before him was scowling, but it seemed more of a resting face than one of actual annoyance. In fact, there was amusement and curiosity in the man’s eyes - they were yellow, and slitted like a nocturnal creature’s would be. Jaskier was so taken off guard that he gaped at the sight. Body modifications weren’t unheard of, the general populace wanting more exotic looks, whatever the beauty trend of the day was. But he had never seen glowing yellow eyes like this before. And why would someone change their eyes but keep the long, snarling scar over one of those lovely things?

“You must be the artificer,” the man said. His voice was frighteningly deep, and incredibly warm-toned. The upturned tilt to his mouth spoke of ages of wooing and joking around, if the white hair didn’t...wait.

“You can’t be more than forty,” Jaskier blurted out, promptly turning beet-red once he recognized what he said. The man narrowed his eyes.

“You better start believing in things that can’t be, kid.” He said no more and walked away. Jaskier stood there, still gawking at the man’s back before regaining his fleeing senses and following him to the dining room.

Amidst stacks of papers in folders, scattered datareaders, and  _ oh that’s a sword, alright, on the dinner table, though? _ there were several plates of food and glasses of wine. And Jaskier had worked for stranger folk, to be sure. He could survive dinner even if he could see his reflection in a damned sword.

Two others were at the table already, sitting next to one another and trading quips as they doled out food onto their plates. The white-haired man sat with them, and the nice-looking terrifying woman from before sat on the other side of the table, bringing out another bottle of wine for the group. “Who’s the kid?” one of the men asked.

Jaskier noticed several things at once, most of which were adjectives of varying degrees of inappropriate table conversation. He sat quickly to hide the more unavoidable signs of his  _ noticing. _ “I’m—”

“The artificer Yen recruited,” the white-haired man said before. “And apparently the other side of my washroom.” He stabbed rather violently into his food, shooting the nice-looking, terrifying woman a look.

“Don’t look at me. I’m not culpable for Regent actions, nor room assignments,” she said, sickly sweet and still ridiculously off-putting. Jaskier picked at his food as the other man began to complain.

“Why do we need an artificer? Kaer Morhen has been standing for almost seven hundred years, and it was built by people who didn’t even know how to read.”

Jaskier’s brows furrowed. He knew that name.

“Yeah, well, artifacts are now being powered by steam, and we need to adapt to that, is what it looks like. I’m not telling Vesemir,” the third man at the table said, flicking his head to the side to shake the hair out of his face, revealing a deep set of scars, long-healed, but it must have been not very deep or he must have known a very good surgeon. “I’m Eskel.” He held out a hand as big as Jaskier’s face across the table, which Jaskier shook eagerly.

The pulse through their touch stole his breath for a moment. Eskel was a very,  _ very _ powerful alpha, if he could wrap Jaskier’s faculties around one handshake with ease like this. “Ja—I’m Jaskier Pankratz. Is it just Eskel, then?”

The alpha grinned. “Just Eskel. This is Lambert, just Lambert, and Geralt of Rivia.”

Oh.

That’s why he knew the name.

Something must have shown in his face, because Lambert started to laugh. “Now he gets it. I told you someone must still be sharing Dandelion’s fucking stories.”

“You’re…”

“Witchers,” a new voice said from the doorway. A fourth cat-eyed man, with visible age in his face, in the set of his shoulders, walked forward and stood over Jaskier with silent intensity. They did not speak to one another for a very long time. From what Jaskier knew of witchers, this must be Vesemir, leader of the Wolf School of Kaer Morhen, and… “You’re in my seat.”

“Oh! Fucking bollocks, right.” Jaskier scrambled to move to the next available spot at the table, the stain of blush on his cheeks having not left since the ‘not a day over forty’ remark. “So you’re. So witchers are real?”

“You think we look this pretty on purpose?” Lambert drawled, sitting back and enjoying the unfolding conversation.

“I just...they’ve always been called legend, from everyone I heard. And—wait. Are you a witcher too?” He turns to the nice-looking terrifying woman, who only grins wider.

“Just a mage. Triss Merigold, nice to meet you. Again.”

“Triss Merigold, hero of So—”

Eskel cleared his throat and shook his head minutely. Jaskier blinked rapidly several times to take in this information a little better. “You can ask your questions later when we’ve all had a suitable chance to run away,” Eskel said, sipping his wine to cover his grin.

“Why do we need an artificer? Kaer Morhen’s fine.”

“The earthquake that shut down most of the Nefaria Wright section begs to differ,” Triss said into her own wine. “Eat your dinner, we’ll argue later so you all can run away and Jaskier and I can win the argument.”

“I like you,” Jaskier said,  _ sotto voce. _

“Eat your dinner.”

Jaskier kept one eye on the table weaponry while he ate, but by the time Triss brought out dessert, they had faded neatly into the woodwork. He sat back, watching them all speak and thinking to himself,  _ this is the strangest interview process I’ve ever been a part of. _

“Oh, this isn’t the interview, Jaskier. We’re a long way off from that,” Triss said coolly. Jaskier froze. Had he spoken aloud? Wait. Turning his head to the mage, he noticed the mischief in her eyes. “Get used to it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jaskier sighed.

“Okay, so fine, he’s adaptable, it doesn’t mean we need him in Kaer Morhen, I’ve been handling the whole home operation completely fine for three hundred years.”

_ Not an exaggeration, right. _

Triss snorted into her wine. “Completely fine?” she recovered, sitting up straighter. “The pneumatics system hasn’t worked for the last century, not to mention the portal system—”

“Which is bullshit, we should get rid of it if it’s such a—”

“Geralt, shut the absolute fuck up. The portal system is eating away at the stone, no matter how many runes you carve into it. Read the writing on the walls, you four. You’ll be rendered obsolete -  _ more _ obsolete - unless you get with the times.”

The four witchers scowled. “Fine. We’ll let him  _ look _ at the place. And if he even thinks about betraying us, I’m tossing him off the aerie myself.”

“The what?”

* * *

Work at Kaer Morhen started promptly at five the next morning, which was rather upsetting for Jaskier, groggy-eyed and tired from a sleepless night. He’d tossed and turned with memories and dreams alike, a terrible blueprint for nightmares. Triss had pressed a hermetically-sealed container of coffee into his hands, and gave him a pitying look. “You’ll have to go up the long way for the first day.”

“What?”

‘The long way’ turned out to be two and a half hours of hiking up from the bed and breakfast, along a winding trail that disappeared in places and reappeared in others, which had Jaskier turned around before long. If it weren’t for Geralt leading the way through the mountainous terrain, Jaskier would have definitely fallen off a cliff before he’d even finished Triss’ coffee.

His shirt and waistcoat were absolutely soaked through with sweat by the time they made it to the last leg of the trail. How Geralt managed to do it with two massive swords on his back and a huge satchel on his shoulder, Jaskier didn’t know. Perhaps he’d been living in the city for too long.

“So you’re a witcher, then?” Jaskier panted, wiping sweat out of his eyes. It was late autumn, but it seemed like every single ounce of humidity was stalking them up this godforsaken mountain. He didn’t even know how stupid he sounded.

“Your powers of observation are truly stunning, Jaskier,” Geralt called back for him, definitely laughing at him.

“Oh, well, thank you,” Jaskier said, rather flattered for all of two minutes. “Hey! I was just trying to start a conversation with you!”

“Conversations tend to end with witchers running away for their lives.”

“Why? Too much talking make your witchery brain swell up like a didge? Speaking of dirigibles. Why couldn’t we take the damned dirigible? I saw one parked on the roof.”

“That’s Eskel’s monstrosity. I like my feet on the ground.”

“Is that why you don’t like portals? What’s a portal look like? Is that the short way, if this is the long way?”

“Mages can’t make a random portal into Kaer Morhen. You have to use one of the doors we already have. And only really good artificers who don’t ask questions get to use the portals.”

“Oh har har, Geralt, I’m sure you’re having a mighty laugh about...me…”

Jaskier trailed off as he saw the incredible mass of Kaer Morhen climb up through the treeline. He swallowed roughly, awestruck and at a loss for words. This was the keep of legend, made reality right in front of him. He was dining and living among witchers and mages, and there was magic and monsters and mystery all laid at his feet.

And Geralt was just walking toward it like it was any other shitty castle in the middle of some bumfuck forest in Kaedwen. Jaskier scrambled to catch up. “Hey!” he called, jogging up the trail toward him.

Several oddly-shaped plinths seemed to stretch through the treeline, in both directions. “What are those—”

“Don’t touch the bombs.”

“The  _ what?!” _

* * *

Through the main gates they walked, and through a courtyard which had definitely seen better days, and a massive oak door that bore the scars of age worse than most monuments down in the valley. They wound through a set of hallways, and Geralt took off his swords, but kept the satchel on. “We’re already late. Vesemir must be fuming. You can make something that runs on his own steam, right?”

Jaskier sputtered. “I—well. If I absolutely had to, I’m sure—”

“It was a joke,” Geralt smirked back at him, infuriatingly unaffected by the hike, and unfairly attractive even now. He shucked off the armor he was wearing, which clued Jaskier in to the fact that—

“I wasn’t wearing armor when we went up.”

“No, why would you? I’m the one carrying the artifacts.” He held up the satchel like it explained everything perfectly.

“Huh?”

* * *

He didn’t see any mysterious creatures or dangerous things hiding around the corner as they walked, so when they entered Vesemir’s office after a long set of stairs, Jaskier was sort of disappointed. Eskel and Lambert were speaking by a set of tubes, clearly arguing over something.

“Finally!” Vesemir scoffed, making to grab for Geralt’s satchel.

“Careful, it bites back a bit.”

_ Did he have a cat in there? _

“Alright.” Vesemir pulled on some gloves and they moved as a group to an empty worktable. He carefully opened the satchel, which didn’t do much of anything until Eskel reached up and snapped on a light. The table was flooded with violet light, and the satchel was absolutely glowing, despite it being made of some kind of leather.

Vesemir reached in with the gloves, and what he pulled out didn’t seem like it needed that much regard, nor the warning Geralt gave.

“It’s a pocket-chron,” Jaskier deadpanned.

“You’ve found us out, kid, we’re all counterfeiters and thieves,” Lambert said sarcastically.

“Little of one, more of the other,” Geralt said, his voice coming right by Jaskier’s ear. He jumped a little. “Corpse I pulled it off of had the chain wrung round his neck. Freshly dead and nobody around.”

“Are you implying the  _ pocketwatch _ killed a man? There’s a bloody apple on the face! It doesn’t even look evil!”

“Shh!” all the witchers hissed at once. Vesemir began to struggle to hold the device, even in his treated gloves, even under the actinic rays.

“Fuck, need me to cast?”

“No I do not, you little brat,” Vesemir bit out. “Bring me a box. No, not that one. The transpariluminum one.” Lambert brought back an item in his hands, though Jaskier could not see it. It looked like he had nothing in his hands at all, yet when he set it down on the table, there was a definite thunk. “Is it open?”

“Yeah, chuck it.”

Vesemir dropped the chronometer and the chain into the area Lambert had framed with his hands, and once it hit the bottom, Lambert smacked the top shut. All the witchers hid their eyes from the flash of light, but Jaskier wasn’t so lucky. He shouted and put his hands to his eyes, momentarily blinded by the reaction. Was this place a lab? What the fuck?

“Alright, well get this to Holding until Triss can sort it for us, but I think if we tag it as ‘mild choking hazard’ that should get the point across,” Vesemir sighed, handing off the transparent box and the angrily hopping pocketwatch to a waiting Eskel.

“Okay, I need answers for whatever the hell that was, right now.”

“What you  _ need _ to do is—”

“Vesemir. He has to learn some things if he’s going to manage to help us. Remember what Triss said.”

“I thought she was just coughing.”

“She said ‘be tactful,’ old wolf.” Geralt turned back to a still-blinking Jaskier, and led him to a chair. “You alright?”

“Will I go blind?”

“Not from one flash,” Geralt assured him. “Maybe about twenty or so, you might need to sit down for a few hours. We haven’t really shown a human all this before, so who knows? Could be wrong.”

“You are so much stranger than I ever thought one person could be, Geralt of Rivia.”

“Thank you,” he said genuinely.

Jaskier’s vision returned, and Vesemir returned to grumbling all over the office, muttering about ‘invaders’ and ‘damned artificers’. Lambert smacked at the tubes with a wrench, which wasn’t doing much for Jaskier’s growing migraine. Eskel returned, sans box.

“What the hell is this place? What do you keep in here? More deadly timepieces?” Jaskier demanded, looking between them all.

“Sometimes I like to think of it as the Continent’s forgotten attic, but I think you’ll appreciate the term Yennefer likes to call it…”

“What’s that?”

Vesemir opened a door, and Jaskier’s life changed instantly.

“Endless wonder.”


	2. #AL-004: Dragon, Steel and Diamond

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh yeah, the end of the world is closer than you think, Jaskier.

Kaer Morhen had been home to many strange and mythical beings, from witchers and mages and powerful children that were both, to, on one occasion, a very peculiar horse. Like most castles, she had her own secrets, and her own peculiarities. The section of her underbelly that now housed a ridiculous amount of magical artifacts was interesting, but she didn’t waste too much energy on thinking about it.

Which was where Jaskier came in.

With the stones above and below and to each side crumbling over the centuries of doing nothing, the chaotic energy of the warehouse became an invisible eroding force against it, and the structure was compromised. Systems and machines which had worked maybe fifty years ago lay dormant, asleep in their early graves. The stone steps possessed a bit of magic of their own, slick and dangerous to those who couldn’t see as well as witchers.

“Watch your step,” Vesemir grunted as Jaskier slid to the end of the landing in a crumpled pile of artificer.

“Yeah, thanks for the warning,” Jaskier groaned from the floor. Geralt, always a step behind, offered a hand up. Jaskier took it, and bit his lip to hide the sensation - like Eskel, Geralt was a powerful alpha, and a young omega like Jaskier was powerless against his sway.

“Let’s keep moving, human,” Vesemir snapped, already down another set of stairs.

“You keep saying things that make me want to believe you lot  _ aren’t _ human,” Jaskier says, taking the stairs much more carefully, this time.

“It’s witcher humor. You’ll catch on eventually. We’ve been witchers longer than any of us were human, and were treated like we weren’t even that when we all walked the Path.”

“So witchers are created? I thought you had to be born into magic.”

“Mages, yes, and some species of monsters on the Continent, but they’re mostly extinct, thanks to us. We were subjected to a great many horrific experiments, and before you ask, no, we don’t do them anymore, and the mortality rate would be a hundred percent for you if you tried it.”

“Right.” Jaskier paused a bit, collecting his thoughts while he traversed down to the main floor of the warehouse. Grand stacks of shelves and a labyrinth of other storage units scattered out into the ether, illuminated by gently floating spheres of light. Jaskier just assumed they were photic in some way, his mind searching for possible scientific outcomes for the multitude of questions rattling his spine.

“Our first stop is the pneumatic generator,” Vesemir explained as he walked. Despite his obvious age, he was pretty spry, and still definitely a mutant like the rest. Jaskier wouldn’t want to go up against him in the ring anytime soon.

“Miss Marigold mentioned the pneumatics were inoperative,” Jaskier said, patting his pockets down to find the one thing he took along with him up the trail - a pen and field notebook. “What system were they constructed on? Augustan or Hugonic?”

“Lambert,” said Geralt and Vesemir at once.

Jaskier frowned, trying to work out what that would look like.

A Lambert-created pneumatic system, it turned out, looked like—

“—a fucking nightmare. How did. What is? Huh?”

Jaskier stood there, sputtering and swearing as he paced around the massive generator and tubes connected to it. “Well?” Vesemir said, crossing his arms with a smirk. “It worked pretty damn snappy when it ran. Think you can fix it, or should we send you back down the mountain?”

The artificer straightened his posture, still facing away from the witchers. Geralt could see a muscle jumping in his jaw for a moment before Jaskier’s demeanor cooled, and he turned. “Did he at least make blueprints of whatever this monstrosity is?”

Several hours later, Geralt returned to the engine room with lunch, a few sandwiches on a plate with some cherries in a bowl, balanced precariously in one hand. He didn’t see the artificer anywhere, though. Carefully setting their food down on a table, he reached out with his senses. Wandering in the warehouse was never a good idea, especially if one didn’t know the way. “Jaskier?” Geralt called, holding his breath to better listen for any sign of the man.

“Just a minute! I’m...alright this is embarrassing. Can you see the ladder?” Geralt followed his voice and discovered a ladder on the ground, decidedly done working for the day. Jaskier, on the other hand…

Was clutching at the underside of a thick web of piping, shoulders and thighs shaking with exertion. “How long have you been hanging like that?” Geralt said, immediately setting the ladder to rights.

“Oh, not long,” Jaskier whined, an air of forced positivity in his voice. He nearly slipped right off the ladder when he got his noodly legs and arms around it. He made it down.

“Why didn’t you call for help? We would have heard you up in the office.” Geralt frowned terrifically down at him. He’d had literally hundreds of years to perfect it.

It worked, Jaskier cowing a little bit. He had a streak of old black grease on his forehead, and his cheeks were a ruddy red-pink from holding on for dear life. “I didn’t want Vesemir to think I couldn’t do it.”

Geralt softened at that. “C’mon, I brought lunch.”

They sat at the worktable in the engine room, Jaskier all but collapsing into his chair. Geralt grunted as he stretched out his knee, rubbing along the side of it with vigor. Jaskier watched him for a few seconds, working out what was going on. “You’re hurt?”

Geralt flicked his bright eyes up to Jaskier. “Old injury. You don’t hunt monsters for three hundred years without picking up a few scrapes here and there.”

“Three hundred years?” Jaskier said breathlessly. “If you don’t mind me asking, how old  _ are _ you?”

Geralt smirked, finally getting a good stretch in his knee. “Well, you said it yourself, I couldn’t be a day over forty.”

Jaskier gave a laugh in disbelief. He ate his sandwich. “Well, if you’ve been collecting things here for two hundred fifty or so, and walking the path for another three, I think I can put together a number I’d rather not know. Are the others the same?”

“Vesemir’s pushing a thousand.”

“That’s certainly apparent.”

“You find out anything in the rafters, o mighty artificer?”

Jaskier set down his food and brushed his hands on his thighs. “In fact, I did.” He left, and returned with several leather-wrapped scrolls. “Lambert thought it would be funny to keep the blueprints at the exact most inaccessible area of the room.”

“He used to run with Cats back in the days on the Path. Acrobatic motherfuckers, all of them were.”

“Cats?”

“Yeah, C—oh, right. Human. We’re school of the Wolf, school of the Cat is another. Most are dead, far as we know. But…” Geralt rolled his shoulders, relaxing. “World’s growing smaller. Edges of the map getting filled in every day. Used to be only winged beasts in the sky, now we have fucking dirigibles and aerowhatevers zooming around.”

“Don’t sound too bitter, a lot of good’s happened over the last hundred years or so.”

“And a lot of bad,” Geralt said, but did not further elaborate. The dark shadow that passed over his expression told Jaskier not to press any further.

“Do you have a brace for that knee? Walking up a mountain just to get to work every day doesn’t sound like it’s doing wonders for your health.”

“A brace?”

“Good lord.”

* * *

Jaskier was preemptively forbidden from tinkering until the pneumatics were at least a little less dead, so he turned to machine necromancy for the rest of his first day on the job. Things were just about unclogged (who sticks a slice of toast in a pneumatic tube system?) by the time Vesemir fetched him. He looked up at the mass of metal and fastenings.

“Doesn’t look like you did much,” the old witcher groused.

“Thought you’d say that. There was a piece of wheat-based debris stuck in the external office valve, but I can confidently say that were this beast fired up on steam, you’d be able to move a capsule from your office to this room with nary a kink in the tube.” Jaskier finished parading about the room.

“Bully for you, but there’s about fifty years of reports backed up from other autonomous sectors you need to undo before you can walk around with a smile on your face. You can keep your job til tomorrow.”

“Aye-aye, fearless witcher,” Jaskier snarked, packing up his notebook and straightening out his clothes. He’d lost the waistcoat after an unfortunate glob of old grease had deposited itself on his chest, but he didn’t particularly like that waistcoat anyway. The strange fabric-eating acid in the grease had ensured that.

“You can portal down with me. I’m sure everyone wants to ignore how your first day went over dinner.”

* * *

Portals. Were. Awesome. After the initial stomach-clenching nausea had passed, Jaskier blinked the swirling black void from his eyes and immediately wanted to go through again, and would have, were it not for Vesemir’s steel grip on his arm.

“Go clean up. Triss won’t feed you looking like a greased-up spaniel.”

Jaskier thoroughly enjoyed his shower, because they had a  _ shower _ in the washroom, in addition to a massive tub in the corner. His thoughts raced, unable to digest the entire day’s events at once. Twice, he had to leave the shower to scribble careful notes in his notebook, thoughts about how to improve the pneumatics coming to him, one eureka after another.

By the time his watch signalled for dinner, he felt like a completely different man. The second he saw Lambert, he straightened his shoulders and made a beeline for him.

The witcher, amazingly, shrank back in terror. He’d been told almost immediately what Jaskier thought of his invention, but that man was left in the belly of Kaer Morhen. This newly-showered Jaskier was enlightened.

“Who taught you the alembic pressure trick?” Jaskier said. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“Yes, sir,” Lambert laughed, all at once relieved to not be next in line to lose his balls.

Dinner was spent like a tennis match, watching conversation rapidly shift back and forth between Lambert and Jaskier, most terms flying straight over the other’s heads, except for Eskel, whose dirigible was practically his child.

“How’d he do?” Triss asked Geralt, under her breath.

“I don’t think he’ll die for the first month, but he’ll get close. Doesn’t like people helping him.”

“And the Kaer?”

Geralt shifted in his seat. “She seems to tolerate him well enough.”

* * *

Jaskier took the portal up to Kaer Morhen the next day, already breaking into a run to get back into the engine room and finish the pneumatics. Lambert had teased at other, more fantastical machines dotted around the warehouse, which sent his curious mind into a flurry.

It was on his way to the engine room that he heard his name called. He stopped in his tracks, looking around at who could have called for him. “Hello?” he said, peering between two stacks of artifacts.

His name was called again, in that same just-out-of-earshot way that had caught his attention before. He entered the aisle, careful to stay in the middle of it while he walked, the painted white line showing where it was safest to walk.

Thirty minutes of wandering passed before Geralt appeared, sighing. “Someone mis-shelved the Ventrilocast again.”

Jaskier looked around. They were in a completely different area of the warehouse, somewhere he hadn’t been before. He blinked and checked his chronometer. What had felt like thirty minutes had been four hours. “What—I was just—”

“I know, it’s fine. You were bound to get whammied by something in the first week.”

“Whammied?”

“Lambert’s term - a lot of these artifacts have a mesmeric field of attraction, and typically, you can resist it if you know it’s happening, which is why we work in pairs out in the field.”

“Mesmeric field of attraction,” Jaskier repeated. “Sounds...scary.”

“Somewhat. Here. We forgot to outfit you with one yesterday, but we found another Vesemir was hoarding.” Geralt handed him a small device, about half the size of a data reader, but with a screen and a hatched metallic bottom.

“What is it?”

“Press the button on the side.” Jaskier did, and the screen came to life in a burst, a diagram with a glowing pair of red dots on the screen. “This interfaces with the birefringent crystals to show your position in the warehouse. That’s us. Use the wheel to pull back, and…” The map showed their location, complete with compass directions. “Tap somewhere.”

“Tap?”

“Yeah, you can touch it.”

“But it’s glass. Wouldn’t it be hot if it’s—”

“Not everything is powered on steam in here, Jaskier.” Geralt gave him a smile. “Try it.”

When Jaskier tapped the screen, a green line trailed out from his location to the next. “It’s a direction-finder.”

“A little more than that, but yeah. Feel free to fiddle around with it when you have time. It’s best not to go exploring in here. This is where we keep the things that go bump in the night, and we wouldn’t want you getting bumped on your second day. Here it is.”

Geralt hopped up and pulled down what looked like a miniature gramophone, which called Jaskier’s name in that faraway way he’d been hearing for the last few hours.

“That’s the Ventrilocast, then?” Jaskier nodded, keeping his eyes on it.

“Sure is. It belonged to a mother with eight children, she used to yell so loud next to this that it would use her voice, and call up people’s names even long after she died.”

“That doesn’t sound like something that goes bump in the night.”

“Remember the four hours of wandering around you did?”

“Ah. Right then. Back, foul Ventrilocast.”

Re-shelving seemed to be a pretty usual occurrence in the warehouse. Jaskier didn’t ask  _ how _ inanimate objects like the Ventrilocast were able to get from one place to another without anyone involved in its travels, but he could posit that it was something he’d rather not think of. He preferred to think of gears and gauges, not funny words and waving hands.

He was returned to the engine room, and the small device was put in his pocket. Geralt turned to leave. “Oh. If you hear anything weird, press the button on the right side.”

“Is it an alarm or something?” Jaskier smirked.

“No, but it’ll get you help. I’ll leave you to it, mighty artificer.” Jaskier fought the blush at least until that white head of hair had passed through the door, and bit down a wide grin. His heart beat faster, the omega part of his body kept so repressed and hidden roaring with satisfaction, hearing praise from such a high alpha.

He flew through his work, managing to pry out those fifty-year-old reports from the incoming tube system. He sat on the ground, taking a break as he read them.

> _ TO: Office _ _  
>  _ _ FROM: S-81 “Kearney” _ _  
>  _ _ MSG: Unauthorized removal of item #S-81-5583-569B. Current location: UNK. Recover immediately. _

“Well,” Jaskier hummed. “Hope that one turned out alright.” He placed it to the side. He opened another.

> _ TO: Office _ _  
>  _ _ FROM: L-773 _ _  
>  _ _ MSG: Lock broken on locker. Remedy immediately. _

He read a few more before he got to one that seemed…

“Oh shit.”

Important.

Jaskier ran back into the office, clutching as many pneumatic capsules and opened parcels as he could find. “Some of these might be important for you lot to look at, because I don’t know what an Apocalypse Locker is, but it’s fucking broken.”

The witchers looked at him in frozen silence. “Why’d you break the Apocalypse Locker, Jaskier?” Lambert shouted as he burst into a run, vaulting down the stairs with ease.

“I didn’t!” Jaskier protested, following the herd out before Vesemir put a hand on his chest.

“Stay here. Use your Farnsworth to monitor our positions. That button calls Yen. Don’t call it unless you really really have to.” Vesemir disappeared before he could explain anything else.

It took an embarrassingly long time for Jaskier to figure out he was talking about the direction-finder device Geralt had given him. He pressed the location button, which showed three red dots running to the eastern part of the warehouse. It took them awhile to get to where they were going, which was pretty boring to watch. They stopped for a moment, before starting to blip apart. “They’re splitting up,” Jaskier whispered.

“Who’s splitting up?” a voice said from behind him.

Jaskier jumped nearly out of his skin, fumbling his Farnsworth and leaning off of the button…

The one that called a very terrifying, very beautiful, very unsmiling woman named Yen to the warehouse.

“Fuck.”

* * *

Four witchers lay sprawled on the ground, about to get eaten by a giant dragon made of steel and diamonds, when the scent of lilac and gooseberries flooded the area, and a dark purple glow followed. The dragon froze, mere feet from taking off Lambert’s leg while he screamed in terror. Jaskier watched in awe as Yennefer of Vengerburg simply brought her hands together, as if in prayer, and the dragon’s shining wings closed as easily as if they were folded paper. The witchers scrambled away from where they’d been trapped.

The dragon was put back in its locker, which had apparently rusted over so tremendously it only took a small earthquake from the Nefaria Wright section for the dragon to come free. It had been sleeping for a few months before the witchers even thought to go check on the place.

“I mean it’s literally called the Apocalypse Locker, why isn’t that, I dunno, the first thing you check daily?” Jaskier asked as they all walked back. Yennefer was speaking with Vesemir a good forty paces behind them, for the purpose of relative privacy while they spoke.

“We don’t tend to check on things once they’ve been tagged and shelved,” Geralt admitted what the others wouldn’t. “It’s a warehouse, not a hotel.”

“Those reports I found shoved in the pneumatics say otherwise. There’s unauthorized de-shelfing happening all over the place here and whoooat. I just said that absolutely seriously. I sound like a librarian.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Eskel said, wrapping an arm around his shoulder. “By the by, how long do you think it’ll take for you to fix that reporting system?”

* * *

Apparently, animated metallic dragon attacks seemed to put a pin in the rest of the workday, so the group made to pack up and head back to the B&B.

“Jaskier, may I speak with you?” came Yennefer’s terrifyingly smooth voice.

“See you back at home, Jas,” Geralt said, resorting to stepping through the portal he loathed just to get away from whatever was going to happen in the office. Vesemir was still out on the floor.

“Of course, ma’am.” Jaskier set his jaw and swallowed nervously despite himself. Once the office was clear of witchers, she leaned on the desk.

“I’ve been told you’ve lasted longer than any of the others expected.”

“It’s my second day!” Jaskier exclaimed.

“Expectations were made to be broken, or surpassed. Life’s too boring when they’re just met.” Mirth danced in her violet eyes, distractingly beautiful despite the power she held.

“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, ma’am, should I have died?” He frowned. Had his survival been a disappointment? Stranger things have happened.

“Not at all. I was just curious as to how you were getting on with the place.”

This took him off guard. Of all his conversations he’d ever had with bosses, with professors, with any authority figure, he’d always gotten a healthy dose of “I’m rather disappointed in you” and “you shouldn’t steal the Chief Inspector’s autocar”, but never “how are you adjusting to a magical warehouse full of murderous pocketwatches, hellish art installations, and distracting gramophones?”

“I…” Jaskier cleared his throat. “I got whammied for four hours by a gramophone, I mistakenly called for help in a situation that would have ended with this whole place destroyed, and I...I fucking love it, if I may be candid.”

Yen watched him for a few moments before smiling.

“Thank you, Jaskier. For calling for help. I’m sure you’ll need to do it less and less as you stay on. Try not to die tomorrow. I want to see Eskel’s bettings in my pocket.”

She opened a portal with a flick of her fingers, swirling and strong and perfectly Yennefer-sized.

“Ma’am, wait—” Jaskier took a step forward. “Was there anyone that bet on me just to live...in general?”

She paused and tilted her head to the side. “I gave you twenty years.”

“Oh,” Jaskier said, unsure if he was relieved or soured.

“Geralt gave a hundred,” she said, and walked into the portal.


	3. #O-4735: Datareader, Intentionally Possessed

As amazing as the warehouse was, Jaskier’s work was contained to the engine room for the first several weeks, while he sorted out the tangle of tubes Lambert called a “perfectly-made machine”. Jaskier’s aim with the wrench had not improved in those weeks. Geralt liked to visit him from time to time, which made him wonder if the witcher actually ever went out into the field at all.

His questions were answered when one day, Geralt approached him as he poured a lubricating solution into the belly of the machine, the other ends he could get to, completely sealed off. Geralt had his swords on his back, a heavy leather coat on over his torso, and a pair of gloves in his hand. Jaskier finished his job and turned to look at him. “You look like you’re going somewhere.”

“Vesemir found a ping in Beauclair. Something about fire tornadoes happening more often than usual.”

“Ah, well. I hope there’s something fireproof you can hide behind.” Jaskier frowned as he thought about the alpha going head-first into danger, but told himself he was being silly, that he’d been doing this for years and years and didn’t need some omega worrying about him.

“We have a few tricks up our sleeve still, despite our age.” Geralt’s eyes held that same regretful look Jaskier felt in his chest. The artificer looked down at his clasped hands, dirty and bearing several scrapes already.

“How long will you be gone?” Jaskier asked, too eagerly to hide his heart on his sleeve.

“We don’t have a way of knowing that. I usually check in once I get to the location, and consult several times during the hunt—I mean, investigation.”

Jaskier brightened. “I can reach you on the Farnsworth, then?”

“You can,” Geralt assured, showing him how to set up a direct line to his device. “I’ll be with Eskel, so it’s not like I’m going in alone.”

“You’re flying there,” Jaskier realized. “That sounds like fun!”

Geralt shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Eskel may have built that damned thing from the sky down, but he can’t navigate it without making me sick to my stomach.”

“Well. I suppose now’s as good a time to give you this. Consider it a good luck present.” Jaskier retrieved a small parcel from the workstation. He watched Geralt’s face as he unwrapped it, and blurted out, “It’s a brace for your knee,” before Geralt finished uncovering it.

Geralt looked up at him, a question in his expression.

“I sort of. Well, it’s very adjustable, and you can adjust the tension and support here and here, and. Well, it’s very rough, so if you. Well you don’t  _ have _ to use it while you’re out there, but. I don’t know, if you hate it you can toss it out of the dirigible, but I wouldn’t wear it more than a few hours at a time, until I know it works well for you. You don’t have to though—”

“Jaskier.” The artificer realized that Geralt had been trying to get his attention several times, and blushed in embarrassment. “Thank you for this. I’ll try it out. You didn’t have to do this for me.”

“I did. You’re hurting, and you’re my friend. It’s the logical outcome.”

“Logic or not, I appreciate it. I guess I’ll have to call you on the Farnsworth now, to figure out how to put it on.”

“Oh,” Jaskier breathed, suddenly rather pleased with himself. The alpha made to reach out for him, but pulled back at the last moment, frowning to himself before walking away. Jaskier watched his back until he could no longer see him.

He wondered what that touch would have felt like.

* * *

The rest of the day was a wash, spent mostly sighing and looking around for the nearest window to daydream out of. He pocketed his Farnsworth and went back up to the office.

Vesemir was poring over a few log books that looked older than Jaskier. “Something wrong in the engine room?” Vesemir asked, dismissiveness heavy in his tone.

Jaskier could play at that. “The blueprints only show what’s in the room. Where are the other hubs and tube endings?” Vesemir looked up at the plucky young omega, ready to sass him, but knowing that was a fight Jaskier at least had an advantage in.

“About time you met Oates,” Vesemir said, standing up from his maps. Jaskier looked around, but saw no one else standing there.

“Is Oates...invisible?” Jaskier said tentatively, remembering the box from his first day.

“He’s certainly dead, but not invisible. Here.” Vesemir handed Jaskier a data reader, about as large and heavy as one of the old tomes in the office. “This is Oates, or as he’s better known by our records, #O-4735.”

Jaskier took the tablet, looking at it like it might bite him. “...hello?”

_ “Pzzht who’s this guy?” _ said the tablet, in a rumbling tone. Jaskier nearly dropped it, his head on a frantic swivel, trying to tell if this was all some joke.

“Oates, this is Jaskier, he’s the warehouse’s new artificer.”

_ “Pzzht artificer? Why do we need an artificer? Did you break my warehouse?” _

Jaskier stood, bewildered, as Vesemir seemed to be chided by the tablet’s words.

“She’s in disrepair, and we needed younger labor. Jaskier, Oates is a data reader possessed by the spirit of one of the previous engineers for the warehouse. Most of the layout on the floor, and the overhead machinery was made by him. Yen had him possessed when he died.”

_ “Pzzht and I’ve been their problem ever since, so they say.” _

“Oh! Well. It’s very nice to meet you, my good...tablet.” Jaskier frowned. They didn’t exactly explain how to properly converse with machines in the Academy.

_ “Pzzht Oates is fine.” _

“Will you take him back to the engine room? The other artifacts don’t really like him, I’ll warn you.” Jaskier nodded at Vesemir and carefully made his way back down the stairs.

_ “Pzzht they just don’t like the tracking system I created for their antsy selves.” _

“You all talk about the artifacts like they’re living and breathing things,” Jaskier observed.

_ “Pzzht some of them are.” _

Once Jaskier got over his initial fear of the man-slash-ghost-machine, he found himself thoroughly distracted from his initial depression over Geralt being gone. It lasted all through the rest of the work day until he had to go back to the B&B for dinner.

Though oddly, when Jaskier walked into the washroom he shared with Geralt, he found the witcher’s door wide open, as if waiting for Jaskier to come in. He bit his lip, thoroughly expecting a trap.

What he found instead was a room that was tidy and lived-in. In addition to the large bed and desk in the room, there were several shelves and other glass-doored armoires full of knickknacks and books and framed pictures. Jaskier held his breath, like this whole place would disappear if he even blinked. The whole room smelled like Geralt, most concentrated on the bed and a little cushion on the floor nearby. He’d seen the witchers in meditation before, and had winced at the strain it’d have on his knees, but knew it helped them concentrate and focus better.

He walked a little closer to the side of the bed, seeing a framed picture of the four witchers, the two sorceresses he’d met, and several others. They were all smiling, even Yennefer. One woman was at Lambert’s side, a bit shorter, with a mischievous look in her eyes. Her smile was more of a smirk. Under Geralt’s arm was a stunningly beautiful young woman, her hair as light as Geralt’s, dressed sharply, though this picture must have been taken decades ago. Jaskier didn’t know who it was, and felt a slight pang at the thought that she might be close to Geralt.

He was nearly shocked out of his skin when his Farnsworth started buzzing, the tell-tale rhythm of someone trying to call. He set the picture down and ran back to his room, sitting at the desk and gathering himself before answering the call.

Geralt’s face appeared, achromatic and slightly grainy, but definitely him, and he was smiling. “Jaskier?” he asked.

“Geralt!” He couldn’t help how breathless he sounded. “I’m here. I’m in my room. The room that is mine. How can I help you?”

The witcher gave a slight pause before smiling a little wider, obviously enjoying the flustered look on the artificer. “I’m trying to put on the brace, but I’m admittedly a little lost.”

Jaskier switched into instructive mode, aided by Geralt’s rather distracting tilt-down of the kinetoscope on the Farnsworth, showing off his exceptionally tight breeches, hiked up over the knee. Even from the shoddy picture on the kinetoscope, Jaskier could see the gnarled knot of scar tissue covering the outside of his knee. He stumbled over his words just a little. “W-Well, get it snug, first, and if it’s uncomfortable, obviously adjust it, the lateral straps secure to themselves, you want them firmly pressed over the bottom of your thigh and the top of your calf—”

“So my knee?” Geralt quipped, the scope tilting back to flash his smirk. At least with the achromatic scopes, Geralt couldn’t see his blush.

“Well, if you try and put an immobile belt around your knee, you won’t be able to bend it. The brace is there to support the areas outside of your injury, so the stress isn’t put on where it’s hurting. Hurted. Where it’s hurt. Your knee. Where your knee is hurt.”

“Am I trying to cut off circulation with this? I can get it pretty tight,” Geralt grunted, the picture shaking as he worked.

“It’s a brace, not a tourniquet.”

They spent fifteen minutes getting it right, and Jaskier nearly dropped his Farnsworth when Geralt said, “Maybe you should just show me in person how it’s done, when I get back.”

He sputtered out something to the affirmative, before hanging up the call.

“Fucking hell, Jaskier you are such a fucking knob, I swear,” he groaned, head in his hands.

* * *

The next day was spent puttering around the warehouse, eyes on his Farnsworth, walking from point to point, where Oates led him. In one day, he managed to get four report points back up and running, which had him practically dead to the world over dinner. With Eskel and Geralt both gone, and Vesemir perpetually on back-end support at the office, dinner was a quiet affair of just him, Lambert, and Triss.

“So have you started actually flirting with Geralt yet, or are you letting your flirty omega wiles woo him by default?”

Alright, well it  _ was _ a quiet affair. Jaskier nearly swallowed his fork before he managed to recover enough to bark out an “I’m not  _ flirting!” _

Triss and Lambert weren’t having it, however. “Please, Jaskier, you’ve been making moon eyes at the White Wolf for weeks now, and you’ve just given him a gift. You’re courting him.” Triss punctuated her logic with a sip of wine.

“Courting? Are you—oh right, you’re all a million years old, of course you’d think I was—why, is it working?”

Triss and Lambert grinned wolfishly before turning their attention back to him.

“Well, you’ll have to get through Ciri—”

“Not to mention Yen—”

“When’s your next heat? Is it soon? Geralt liiiiikes omegas in heat, he gets all shaky and noodly—”

“Oh, I remember when Yen last—”

“With the formalities!”

_ “Omega, may I assist you in your time of unbearable horniness? _ Like I wasn’t even there!” Triss gave an admirable impression of Geralt, but Jaskier was absolutely lost.

“Please stop talking,” he begged, wishing he’d actually choked and died on the fork from earlier.

“Oh, Jaskier, we’re not making fun of you, it’s just that Geralt is horrendously terrible about relationships. Before...well, before Yen and I got together, they were a thing.”

Dread locked in Jaskier’s gut. “A thing?” he squeaked.

“Yeah, on and off for something like three hundred years?” Lambert shrugged. “On the one hand, they were a power couple, but for a while they were just staying together for Ciri, I think… And then you and Yen got together, she’s really mellowed out. What’s your secret?” he leered at Triss playfully.

“Wouldn’t be much of a secret if I told you, now, would it?” she teased back.

“Who’s Ciri?” Jaskier asked weakly.

“Okay, we need more wine for this.”

* * *

Several hours and bottles of wine later, Jaskier was thoroughly sloshed and incredibly well-versed in Geralt of Rivia’s relationship history. His not-really-related sort-of-died-that-one-time daughter Ciri (there were like eight other names to that name that Jaskier couldn’t remember) was currently in Skellige hunting down some of the more delicate artifacts. She could portal through time and space, and make it back to shelve things with greater efficiency than the witchers, but hadn’t come home for a fair few months, much to everyone’s dismay.

Jaskier’s heartache and wanting for Geralt grew the more he drank, which is how he ended up falling asleep in the alpha’s bed, content to be wrapped in his scent entirely.

The only thing missing, as he fell asleep, was the man himself.

* * *

That only thing missing was there when he woke up, however.

Kneeling on the meditation mat, dark-ringed eyes closed in concentration and serenity, Geralt kept his hands on his thighs, his pinky traced over the edge of the knee brace. Jaskier shrieked in shock, and fell off the bed, rolling to the other side. He groaned as his shoulders hit the floor, the whole entire room tilting on its side.

“Jaskier?” Geralt’s voice came, along with the sounds of his feet on the floor. Jaskier wished the sound was followed by the sensation of the ground swallowing him whole, but that didn’t come. He could still see Geralt’s face, clear as day and handsome as ever. “You fell off the bed.”

“I fell off the bed.”

“Is there a reason you were  _ in _ my bed?” he didn’t sound angry, or even displeased, which calmed Jaskier’s poor little pounding heart. He sat up, looking around. He sighed. Honesty. He’d go for honesty.

“Triss and Lambert got me unfairly drunk and I think I’m still getting used to the layout of this place?” he tried. He definitely wasn’t going to tell him the part where Jaskier literally followed the scent of home until he crashed into the warmsoftGeralt of the bed.

“Right. Lam probably brought out the homemade vodka, huh?”

“I feel like I’m about to bring it  _ back _ out,” Jaskier complained.

“Aw, poor thing, let's get you cleaned up.”

Getting taken care of by Geralt wasn’t something Jaskier had daydreamed about before, but with his face being gently wiped down by a cloth, being manhandled around his own room, seeing the man actually  _ kneel down _ to help change his  _ socks, _ those memories would be constantly replayed for the rest of his life. “Thank you, Geralt. I’m sorry about the bed thing. I’ll do your laundry for you. Forever.”

“No need, Jaskier. I promise, it was no trouble.” Geralt gave him a smile.

“How’s the brace?” Jaskier asked, eager to change the subject and calm down his fluttering heartbeat.

“I’ve never used one before, but it’s a noticeable improvement from what I’ve been doing.” Geralt and Jaskier looked down at the brace in question.

“What might that be?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Ah,” Jaskier said with a quick jump of his eyebrows. It was his turn to fiddle with Geralt’s person, now, kneeling before him and adjusting bits and buckles here and there. “How’s that? Try—oh, um, or squatting. That too.”

Geralt’s muscles moved enticingly under his thin shirt, and Jaskier felt his mouth go desert-dry. Geralt walked around, lunging in the brace, testing rotation and flexibility. “How does it work?” he asked curiously. Jaskier was all too willing to talk about something that  _ wasn’t _ specifically Geralt’s body.

They sat and talked for almost an hour before a knock at the door interrupted them. “Jaskier, Vesemir needs you up at the Kaer,” Eskel said through the door. “You have ten minutes before he starts throwing things through the portal.”

He looked at Geralt. “Is that common?”

“You should see him when we’re training with swords. He wasn’t always a desk-rider.”

“Right. Well I’ll. Um. Dress. I suppose. Will I see you up there?”

“Eventually.” Geralt started retreating back to his room, but stopped and turned, leaning on the doorframe. Jaskier stilled the hands at the buttons of his shirt. “Don’t let me forget, I got something for you.”

“In Beauclair?” Jaskier grinned.

“Sort of. Go. Hurry.”

* * *

Vesemir was grumbling and all worked up by the time Jaskier came skidding through the portal, practically pushed through by Eskel. “What is it?” Jaskier said.

“You!” Vesemir shouted, whirling on him from where he was angrily pacing. “You let Oates talk you into changing things!”

Jaskier stood, poleaxed. “Uh, I was hired to change things. Oates knows the warehouse. No one talked me into doing anything.” He tried to remain calm, but he hadn’t even had his coffee that morning. Vesemir’s anger was trying its best to drill into that omega submission, but Jaskier knew better than to let an alpha walk all over him for doing nothing wrong.

Vesemir scowled, unused to backtalk, it seemed. “Where’s the rest of the tools in the Dasha section?”

“I wasn’t working in Dasha section.” Jaskier crossed his arms.

“Then why are things missing?”

“Why isn’t there a report about it that you ignore for fifty years, you mean?” Jaskier bristled.

“Oh, don’t you start in on me, you little—”

“What? Little what? You gonna call me an omega and try to take me out at the knees, again? First because I’m a human, second because I’m young, and now because I’m an omega? I can’t help  _ literally _ any of that, so why don’t you just shut up and point me in the direction you need me to go,  _ o powerful alpha.” _

The pair hadn’t noticed the rumbling of the floor until that point, but at the final sneer from Jaskier’s lips, the walls began to shake. The pair looked around, trying to find the source of it.

“What did you do?” Vesemir and Jaskier snapped at each other at the same time.

Suddenly, a portal opened up in the room, and out stepped Yennefer, not a hair out of place. She knelt to the ground and placed two glowing hands on the stone, and the rumbling stopped. Jaskier and Vesemir stared at her in surprise. So much had happened at once that it was a little hard to recover from it.

She stood. “Could you, perhaps,” she sighed. “Cease any interdynamic arguments until you are outside of range of the  _ bombs?” _

Vesemir and Jaskier blinked in shock. “Our arguing...caused that?” Jaskier said, recovering first.

“Yes. the warehouse is The Alpha, and doesn’t like when their pack argues.”

A beat.

“What?!” Jaskier and Vesemir shouted.


	4. #WH-XX-0054: W.O.M.P.

Congregating back at the B&B was the best idea Vesemir had that morning. The other witchers were rather concerned with the shouting they could hear through the portal, and the rumbling coming from the frame around it. Jaskier was still worked up, a steaming stack of omega as he stomped from the ether and back into the hallway. Geralt had just finished a shower, and walked around the house shirtless while his hair dried. He froze in place when he saw Jaskier, Yennefer, and Vesemir walking through.

“Whatever it was, I didn’t do it,” Geralt said quickly.

Lambert and Eskel poked their heads in. “Should we get our swords? Who’s dying?”

“No one, if we’re careful. Please come sit. Couches work best for this conversation.” Yennefer swept into the parlor without another word.

“I’ll just—” Geralt made to go back up to his room, but he was interrupted.

“Nothing we haven’t seen before,” Yen said, not even turning to look. Geralt gave Jaskier an apologetic glance before filing in.

Now fully gathered, the parlor was noticeably more crowded than usual. Jaskier sat on the couch, and Geralt sat next to him. His body heat radiated out into his personal space, making his breath hitch a bit and his head go swimmy for a moment. Gods, but the alpha smelled nice.

“Well, what’s shaking?” Lambert said.

“Incidentally, the warehouse is just as sentient as her artifacts,” Jaskier summarized. “Oh, and it sees us as pack, and it’s our Alpha.”

“Alright, what?” Lambert shook his head and looked to Yennefer, who had a rather sour look on her face.

“I’m guessing it has something to do with the artifacts, because it didn’t carry this kind of energy even with the issues fighting Eredin,” she began.

“Who’s Erin?” Jaskier whispered to Geralt.

“Dead. I’ll explain later.”

“You’re saying that the warehouse...is an artifact? Because it’s been imbued with magic and chaos?”

“Seven hundred years ago, mages were creating alpha witchers in the very basements we work in now. I think the magic that had seeped into the earth began returning.”

“Mesmeric fields,” Jaskier murmured, receiving several impressed looks from the others. “I’ve been reading. And you know. Oates.”

“That damn bastard,” Vesemir grunted.

“As I was saying,” Yennefer snapped. “Along with the magic it gained, its sentience grew the same as ours - with a secondary dynamic.”

“And she’s an alpha?” Eskel said.

“She is  _ The _ Alpha. Of all of us. It’s why, I think, none of us have died under her roof, even after the earthquakes, the dragons, the flooding. She likes us well enough to keep us, and keep us safe, at that.”

The group sat in silence for a moment, absorbing the new information. None of them had any gut feeling that told them it could possibly be wrong, and they had been bringing back enchanted artifacts for centuries. Kaer Morhen, after all, contained enchanted buildings  _ within _ the warehouse.

“This probably has other consequences to it. Does our warehouse...have ruts?”

“Oh, shut up Lambert!”

“It’s a building, for fuck’s sake!”

Lambert threw up his hands. “There are at least forty enchanted sex toys in there!” Jaskier turned bright red at the thought.

“That’d be the biggest fucking knot anyone’s ever seen, if so.”

“Not you too, Geralt!”

Jaskier hid his snort behind his hand and looked around.

“You implied that the...Alpha...doesn’t like when we’re fighting,” Jaskier said, steering the conversation back.

“Thank you,” Yennefer sighed. “You’re right. There is an incredibly protective aura about the whole place. I’d believed it was just from my enchantments, from the bombs, but it looks like it was something else entirely.”

“You had no idea, Yen. Unless. How long have you known about this?”

A new voice joined, followed by a  _ sssnap-pop _ most of them were familiar with. “About since I told her this morning.” The blonde young woman from the picture of Geralt and the rest of the warehouse crew walked in through a haze of green light. If Jaskier hadn’t already heard the whole story about the law of surprise onward, he would have found out who she was by the others’ reactions.

“Ciri!” they all said at once. Everyone stood, and Jaskier felt compelled to stand as well. Geralt pushed to the front, taking her by the arms and looking her over. She was smartly dressed, as she’d been in the picture, wearing a long duster coat, breeches, and a shirt and waistcoat, the way more modern-minded women did in some of the bigger cities of the Continent. Her ashen hair was pulled back into a low bun, keeping it out of her near-glowing green eyes. Unlike the witchers, they were not slitted like a cat’s would be, but possessed a power to them that wasn’t entirely human all the same.

“How long have you been back?” Geralt asked, patting over her face and hair like a worried father would. Jaskier kept his mouth shut.

“Just since morning. I had some things to clear up at the keep before I could come down and see you all. You were just in Beauclair, were you not?” she grinned, beautiful and incandescently happy.

Geralt hugged her again. Jaskier recalled it had been months since they’d seen one another. Despite them meeting hundreds of years ago, Geralt still regarded her like she was just a baby. She didn’t seem to mind. Her age, though probably in the hundreds just as the others, didn’t show even a lick. Magic kept youth frozen and preserved in a jar, and beauty shining like polished diamonds.

She and the others caught up briefly before Yen steered the conversation back to the matter at hand. “Ciri told me she’d had a vision about the warehouse while out in Skellige.”

“Rather inconvenient, as always. Leveled a field of beets.”

“Rest in beets,” Jaskier said, before slapping a hand over his mouth.

“Fuuuucking hell, Jaskier,” Lambert groaned.

“You’re the artificer, then?” Ciri said, turning her eyes toward him. Her gaze flickered to her father for a short moment, knowledge playing behind those green irises, before returning to him.

“Yes, I am Jaskier. You must be Cirilla...er...Ellonian Fiannon?”

She brightened. “Call me Ciri. It’s wonderful to meet you, Jaskier. You’re going to have a wonderful time at Kaer Morhen.”

He looked at her in shock, unsure how to respond to that. The others regarded her “visions” with full weight and seriousness, so he managed an, “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Oh, Geralt, I like him. Good job. I approve.”

Jaskier went red as a dead beet. “I—”

“Oh, we’re not—” Geralt stumbled.

“He’s just—we just—”

“But you smell like each other!” Ciri said with a frown. “And in my vision, you—”

“He fell asleep in my bed, and—”

“And you were in my room helping me, and—”

“Wait, we were in your vision too?” Geralt turned to his daughter.

“Oh, this is too much fun. I’m not telling you now.” The sorceresses grinned in unison from behind her, obviously keen to whatever secrets she was keeping.

“Can we return to the topic about being pack with a sentient building?” Vesemir sighed.

“Only for you, uncle,” Ciri said, kissing his cheek before taking one of the disappearing seats in the parlor. Jaskier was cajoled back into his seat, embarrassed down to his bones.

“My vision came in bits and pieces, over a few decades. It’s probably the furthest I’ve seen at once in either direction… I saw the dragon of steel and gemstones, I saw the walls of the warehouse morphing higher and higher into the keep, twisting into the tunnels and scraping up the insides of the towers. It grew, and settled in, like...like a queen on her throne. And within her belly she kept her pack safe. She kept her mate safe.”

“Her what?” half the group asked.

“She was apparently mated. You can smell that on an alpha, and definitely one as powerful as this.” Ciri shrugged, taking off one of her boots. “Is my room still here?”

“Yes, it is, but Ciri, what was the warehouse keeping the pack—keeping us safe from?” Triss asked, crossing her arms. She shared a tense look with Yennefer. “Is there something coming? Something to the caliber of the Hunt?”

“No, nothing like that. It was a...an alpha’s protection. A near-constant worry. She…when I would meditate, even leagues away from here, I could concentrate deep enough and feel that connection, just in here,” she said, putting a hand over her heart. “When repairs were starting to be made on the warehouse, the warehouse knew.”

“Knew it was too easy,” Jaskier huffed. “She was helping me.”

“Ever walk into an aisle looking for an artifact and find it in your hands suddenly?” Lambert said. “Sure saved the walk.” The other witchers grunted in agreement.

“And Jaskier, when the others were in danger, you were somehow aware of it, weren’t you? You didn’t even notice you were reaching out to me,” Yennefer added. Jaskier just nodded, at a loss for words.

“We can’t just blame every strange happening on the warehouse,” Vesemir protested. “Do any of you sorceresses plan on getting to the bottom of this, seeing how far it will go? It could spell danger.”

“Vesemir’s right,” Jaskier said, surprising everyone, especially himself. “If each artifact has its own mesmeric field, what kind of pull would the warehouse have on trouble outside the fence?”

The group sat and thought about that. “I’m not sure,” Ciri said slowly, leveling her gaze at Jaskier. “But whatever it is, we’ll survive it.

No one disagreed.

* * *

Eskel and Triss, being the coolest-headed of the group, went to investigate the warehouse, and the extent of any damage done from the quakes. Jaskier sat up in his room, trying to avoid the crowd. There was a knock at the bathroom door. “Come in,” he said.

Geralt walked in, holding one arm behind his back. “Are you busy?” he asked, almost sheepishly. Jaskier shut his notebook and smiled, always happy to see Geralt.

“Not at all. I wanted to apologize, for earlier. I didn’t mean to—”

“No. Don’t apologize. Vesemir was wrong for trying to hold your designation against you. I thank you for not doing the same to us. We tend to have more of a powerful effect on humans, just from how long we’ve been walking this earth.” It was true; the older an alpha was, the more power he generally had over others. It’s what put alphas in thrones, behind boss’ desks, and at the right hand of anyone else in control. With the four witchers’ prolonged ages, and mastery in areas of charisma and negotiation, they hardly needed to use their alpha voices on someone to get them to listen.

The same logic worked for mages. They were created as hybrids of alphas and betas, possessing all the power of the first and all the self-control of the second in order to wield their chaos. Jaskier didn’t know what designation Ciri had, but he was willing to bet she was either a hybrid like Yennefer and Triss or an alpha like her father.

It made him feel rather singled out as the only omega on the warehouse’s staff, honestly.

Geralt took a seat on Jaskier’s bed, holding out the parcel for Jaskier to see. “Is this what you got me ‘kind of’ from Beauclair?”

“It is,” Geralt nodded. “I didn’t know if you played, but—”

“Gwent!” Jaskier exclaimed after opening the box. “Oh, Geralt, these are—” he was breathless as he looked through the stack. They all looked vintage, but incredibly well-made and well-preserved. “I’ve never played with someone, I’ve only ever—wait here.” Jaskier carefully set the gift down, and went to his armoire, opening a very well-protected lockbox that was kept up on the hat shelf. He unlocked it using a key that popped out of his wristwatch, which Geralt found entirely fascinating. He opened the box to show Geralt, revealing maybe three dozen Gwent cards, all in rather shit condition, compared to the gift Geralt gave him. “I collected them, they were...gods, they were so hard to find. How did you get your hands on these? They must have cost you a fortune!” he paled at the thought of Geralt wasting money on him.

“I had a favor to call in, don’t worry. No money changed hands. May I?” Geralt gestured to Jaskier’s collection.

“Oh, they’re nothing much, just a bunch of archers and—”

“You mentioned never playing with someone. Do you know how to play?” Jaskier realized how close they were standing, knees almost touching from where Geralt sat, and he stood.

“Are you offering to teach me, Geralt of Rivia?” Jaskier asked softly, a helpless smile on his lips.

Geralt beamed up at him. “Only if you’re alright with getting your ass handed to you the first few dozen times. I’ve never known how to play any way else.”

“I do enjoy a challenge.”

“Then consider yourself challenged. We can start after dinner, if you prefer.”

Geralt handed the lockbox back to Jaskier, their fingers brushing in the exchange. It stole both of their breath. The swirling sensation that came from the other alphas’ touch was different with Geralt, and always had been. Instead of feeling cowed and intimidated, Jaskier instead felt...home. Like his feet had been dangling over the floor his whole life, and was finally weighed down again. Easily flustered, Jaskier blushed and looked away, returning the box to his armoire.

“After dinner, then?”

* * *

Geralt had been right. Gwent lessons with him were fucking rough. To be entirely fair, Jaskier had entirely forgotten the rules about a minute after Geralt had taught them, because Geralt had done some fancy, dextrous move with his hands to shuffle the cards, and that sent Jaskier’s brain on an adventure under the sheets, and entirely inappropriate for camaraderie and cardplaying.

* * *

The warehouse was all too happy to have her pack back in her halls the next day, all transgressions forgiven from the previous morning’s altercation. Jaskier and Vesemir made sure to keep out of the same room as one another, just in case.

After about the seventh mile walked, and no end to the Kearney section reporting tube in sight, Jaskier whined and sat down on the floor, butt firmly planted on the white dividing line between aisles. He sketched a rather sassy idea for an invention, and then did a double-take.

_ Oh, that actually might work. _

The rest of the walk to Kearney was spent with a spring in his step, the miles passing swiftly by underfoot, spurred by his breakthrough. He took notes as he went, noting possible routes, wire trade points, slack hubs.

He nearly slept through dinner, but all the alphas could tell that the omega was exceptionally happy, and eager to tell them about it...once he’d gotten some damn sleep. Geralt watched the artificer with a shine in his eyes, and the sorceresses just smirked.

* * *

He barely managed to get through his coffee before explaining his idea to the group. Upon mention of the phrase ‘aeolipid pylon propulsion systems,’ Vesemir had immediately said, “absolutely not” but wasn’t even heard over the others shouting in excitement.

Jaskier led his group of excitable witchers through the design process. Ciri’s portal-jumping became an invaluable asset as they zipped from place to place, putting up the pylons and attaching them to the tops of existing shelves. It was just after one of these pair-jumps that Jaskier noticed something. “It smells like...cinnamon apples?” he said in confusion.

“Apples means she likes you. Cinnamon means she’s curious about what we’re doing. Try talking her through it, I think she’ll appreciate it, even if she doesn’t understand it entirely. You know, how we do!” Ciri grinned wildly at him, like she hadn’t just blown his mind.

Shoving down the weirdness of the situation, Jaskier decided to take a risk and try it. “Now, the um. Oh, goodness, I haven’t talked to myself in awhile.” He gripped his toolkit tightly. “The-the power grid the warehouse is run on is already pretty taxed from the other mechanisms, so um, these are run on. Well, on wheal, to be technical, but they’re powered by steam propulsion. The um, well, when the meniscus level of this tube drops below a certain pressure, it will automatically tighten the line, and when the reconnect command goes out, it will drop the line to the magnetic transfer drone. So really, you shouldn’t feel a thing,” Jaskier said to the warehouse. The apple smell grew stronger, warmer. “Oh, well. Thank you?”

The project was finished after a week, graciously without any pings interrupting the group. Vesemir scowled at it, arms crossed. “I don’t trust that thing to hold me, let alone you.”

“Well, luckily for you, you don’t have to trust it, it works whether or not your trust issues come into play, dear Vesemir.” Jaskier attached a harness to his chest and around his hips.

Geralt took a step forward, a worried look in his eyes. “Are you sure this is safe? I know you said it would work, but I’d rip it all down with my hands if it—” he took a steadying, calming breath. “You’ll be safe?”

“As houses, Geralt. Don’t worry. Your betting pool will be safe at the end of this.” Jaskier turned to the configuration, plugging in a set of numbers and letters. The analytical engine whirred a bit, calculating the trigonometry and tensions, before the wires before the office balcony began to move. The staff stood in awe as drones flew back and forth around the warehouse, disconnecting and reconnecting the lines as instructed. When the hubbub died down, the machine gave a three-pulse ring, signaling it was ready to go. “Alright, let’s go.” Jaskier opened the new gate on the balcony, stepping onto the platform and quickly attaching his harness to the line. His heart pounded, and all the alphas looked ready to dive after him if he fell. He gulped a little and looked out at the warehouse.

It’d keep him safe.

“Maiden voyage of the Warehouse Omnilocational Multidirectional Polyaeolipid Propulsion Zipline, WOMP for short, uh, mark.”

He flicked the blue light on the carabiner, and the propulsion pulled him down the zipline with a happy whir. He gasped at the feeling of weightlessness and momentum at once, gripping the cord securing him to the carabiner. When the speed slowed as they hit the first transfer point, Jaskier forced himself to keep his eyes open, the switch rail just about in sight. He kept a hand on his goggles and pulled his knees up, just in case.

They passed through without even a bump in the wire. Elated, he let out a whoop of joy, relaxing in the harness as he was transferred to the next point. He spread out on his back, face up to the ceiling and closing his eyes, the breeze inundated with the smell of apples and warm bread.

Jaskier could guess that meant happiness.

* * *

When he finally hit the destination point, he unclipped from the line and stood on shaky legs, looking around at the top of the shelf. He felt on top of the world, dizzy with excitement and glee. He couldn’t stop smiling. He frowned when he heard a small, far-off whirring noise. Peering around, he caught movement, and looked closer, throwing on the zoom function of his goggles.

Geralt was zipping down the line after him, knuckles as white as his hair flowing in the wind behind him. Jaskier grinned at him and waved. He took a few steps back, making room for Geralt as he took his trip. The moment the witcher arrived, he detached from the line with deft fingers and strode forward to Jaskier.

“How was it? Did you feel any tension on the transfer—”

“I’m kissing you now,” the witcher rasped.

“Oh, yes. Please.”

Geralt put one hand on the small of his back and pulled him close, the other going to the back of his head and tilting it for the perfect angle. The moment their lips brushed, Jaskier melted against him, a happy noise clawing its way up from his throat. Geralt kept him close as he finished the kiss, their foreheads pressed together. 

“What um, what brought this on?” Jaskier asked breathlessly.

“You,” Geralt said softly. “You’re a marvel.”

“I um. Thank you. You’re pretty amazing too,” Jaskier said with a grin. “Could we um, maybe do that again? Think I need another, gotta see if it was as amazing as—”

It was.


	5. #J-W-00000: Workshop, Formerly 8949/L Marketship Road, Oxenfurt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been playing Assassin's Creed 2 y'all my brain was kidnapped by Ezio Auditore. Back to writing though!

Things were...normal. Incidentally, Geralt had left on the WOMP saying, “I’m gonna go kiss that artificer,” so everyone knew about it when they got back, one zipping after another. Vesemir was gone, already grumbling about ‘unprofessional behavior’ and ‘shenanigans in my damn keep’. Jaskier and Geralt didn’t mind, though. The playful ribbing Eskel and Lambert gave them both was welcome, and Jaskier had never felt more at home in his life.

In the areas of making things more noticeably like home, however, he realized many of his tools he needed to make repairs and improvements to the warehouse were back at his workshop in Oxenfurt. None of the group were very keen on letting him take the rail line alone, though.

“I’ve done much more dangerous things on my own before,” Jaskier argued. Lambert rolled his eyes, tilting his head to where Geralt was full-body sulking. He’d seen alphas get like this before, possessive to the point of dragging their feet when their omega was even a second out of sight. It grated on Jaskier’s nerves all the same, though, because Geralt was over seven hundred years old, and Jaskier only twenty, how come he had to be the mature one about this?

It wasn’t like he’d be gone forever.

“What do I have to do to convince you I can go alone?” Jaskier groaned, rubbing his hands over his face.

“Unless you have about five years to devote on sword and combat training, I don’t think that’s a speedy solution, kid,” Lambert said.

“There’s plenty of people who die in their beds every year, my luck isn’t so bad that I won’t be one of them.” At the off-hand mention of his human mortality, Geralt’s sulking became audible, a soft whine in the back of his throat. Jaskier crumpled. “I’m sorry,” he said. Geralt walked out of the room to take a walk in the garden of the B&B.

“It’s fine, he’s just being overly dramatic. Listen, why don’t you take one of us with you? It’d be a two-day trip from the Kaedwen Royal Station to Oxenfurt Central. As much as you might think you can keep your head down, you’ve been interacting with too many artifacts, so much so that you probably have a field of your own, and in the wild, mesmeric fields attract nothing but trouble.” Eskel finished his offer with a slide of his whetstone over his sword, leaving a ringing sound in the air.

“Fine. I get to choose who comes with me, though.”

* * *

_ “Ciri?!” _ the witchers shouted. Jaskier kept packing his lighter luggage, less for a two-day trip and more for the inevitability of having to haul a bunch of artificing tools back to the warehouse. All four of them had descended on Jaskier’s room, and now stood in the doorway.

“Yes, Ciri. She’s already agreed, and is entirely excited to go to the city after spending so long in Skellige.” Geralt opened his mouth to argue. “And,” Jaskier continued. “If there’s any trouble, she can zip us out of it in no time flat, which puts her a bit of a step above you four for bodyguard duty. I’m bringing my Farnsworth and— _ oh, _ that’s a knife, alright, what am I going to do with a knife?”

Geralt held the knife out with a serious set to his jaw, frowning at the omega. Jaskier had wormed his way into his heart, and had fastened himself in with his talented hands. The handful of stolen kisses they’d shared when no one was looking had been...unbelievable. Jaskier stole his breath with every small gasp, every gentle touch, and every flutter of his long lashes. To see him go - no, to  _ think _ about seeing him go, was almost unbearable for the alpha. The fact he’d chosen to take the trip with Ciri also bit at the jealous part of his heart, snarls of  _ why not me _ threatening to claw their way up his throat and out into the air.

“It’s to protect yourself. Pointy side in someone else,” Geralt said.

“I know how to use a knife, Geralt. I’m not some waifish fainting omega like they tell about in the books.” He packed the knife in his satchel, just in case. There. He was done. He closed his bags and walked through the alphas down to the front of the B&B.

“You’ll call us when you get to the station?” Geralt said, as Ciri appeared in a flashy gray coat, adorned with dark blue vine embroidery along the hem and placket. At least one of them would be traveling in style.

“Yes, Geralt, we’ll call,” Jaskier sighed.

“And you’ll lock the doors to your train car?”

“I don’t think they’ll let us do that.”

“To your cabin?”

“It’s a night train, Geralt, we’re going to be asleep most of the time.” Jaskier gave him an unimpressed look and fought the urge to roll his eyes.

“And we’ll have so much fun,” Ciri said unhelpfully, taking in the crestfallen look on her father’s face with one of delight on her own. “Bye!”

She grabbed Jaskier’s arm, and they zipped out of there and into a side street near the Kaedwen Royal Station.

Lambert, after allowing what was less than four seconds of silence, said, “I don’t suppose this is the best time to remind you, Geralt, that Eskel and I go into rut tomorrow.”

Geralt sighed, and just pinched his brow.

* * *

The train was a rather impressive feat. Well. Perhaps not the train itself, that was the same as any other damned train on the Continent, but the rail system. That was the feat. Kaedwen was built like a massive bowl, with high, sharp mountains surrounding the entire country. It made invading forces think twice about crossing them, but it also made settlers say, “why waste the effort for whatever shithole is on the other side?”

Population issues aside, the rail system was put down over a period of three years, most of which was spent informing summit towns of blast schedules, construction timeframes, and honestly, just a lot of hush money to bypass most construction ethics codes in the country.

Jaskier explained all of this to a very attentive and polite Ciri, who let the words slide off of her like water on a duck. She had to stay alert and catch Jaskier at the best time to talk about what she really wanted to talk about:

“So what are your intentions with my father?”

Well, no time like the present. Ciri was a time traveler, she tended not to wait for things.

Jaskier fumbled in his monologue about the tunnels of Mahakam, and blinked at her. They were both in their sleeper cabin, down to their pajamas, and sitting across from one another. Ciri looked at him curiously, that all-knowing smile on her face certainly learned from someone that wasn’t Geralt. Yennefer, perhaps.

“Well, I suppose, um. How would you want me to answer that?”

“Honestly.”

_ Well then. _

“As you can ascertain, I didn’t invite him along on this trip.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because…” He frowned. Why didn’t he? If Geralt was here, they would probably kiss the entire way to Oxenfurt, miss the train stop, and end up in Novigrad by the time they came up for air. “Because I needed to concentrate. I’m still fairly...new at courting an alpha, but it seems that a lot of the conventions rely on my giving him undivided attention. I have a job to do. I am an artificer, and—”

“He wouldn’t make you stop doing your job, though. He’s not that kind of alpha.”

“Oh! No, no no no, I wasn’t trying to imply that—oh, gods, I’ve put my foot in my mouth, haven’t I?” he groaned. “I...have you ever spun around so fast the world becomes a blur?”

“Sure,” Ciri said.

_ Of course, she literally jumps through time and space you idiot. _

“Well, that’s how I feel about Geralt. About your father. I feel...grounded, and like I’m flying at the same time. And I’d lived my life very much not spinning around and around up until the moment I met him. Up until I...well. The warehouse probably wasn’t a large adjustment for you, but, I think I needed space, more than tools. I still need the tools, they’re very good tools, but I can’t think straight when I’m with him, when he’s giving me those big eyes and when he smiles and—”

“Oh, you really do like him, don’t you?” Ciri cooed, clasping her hands together. Jaskier blushed and hid his grin in his hands.

“I do. I think it’s why I need to tie up all my ugly loose ends where he can’t see, and I have to do that in a way that doesn’t—”

_ “Pzzht are you going to talk like this the entire way to Oxenfurt?” _

“Oh, fuck.”

* * *

Eskel and Lambert were good mates for one another. Two alphas was usually a recipe for disaster, but they knew each other like the back of each other’s hands. They didn’t dally in Destiny, they didn’t tempt fate, they kept their heads down and their swords high.

The sex was great.

And fucking  _ loud. _

“Vesemir I swear to fuck, I need a ping, I need something, send me out of here, I can’t stand hearing Eskel knot Lambert for the eighth time in a row anymore.” Geralt begged the old witcher.

“I’m not sending you out there alone, Geralt,” Vesemir said. “You’ve known your own hand, so calm down a little.”

_ “A-ah! Eskel! Fuck, you’re so big, fuck FUCK!” _ came through the portal to the warehouse office. The windows in the B&B were most likely shaking.

“Come with me.”

“Oh look, a ping, how convenient. Get your motorcycle.”

* * *

Oxenfurt looked like it hadn’t changed at all in the months Jaskier had been away. It still smelled like piss and smoke, the air was still thick as soup, and the people still didn’t care as long as you weren’t in their way.

“Oh, so that’s the Royal Academy, unimaginative bastards?”

“When were you kicked out?”

“Ten.”

_ “Pzzht bet I could’ve done it in five.” _

“You need to shut up, you’re in very big trouble, you stupid tablet.”

_ “PzzhhhhHHHHHHTHTTTTT—” _

“Does he have an off-switch?”

Jaskier was enjoying showing Ciri around his old stomping grounds. There were plenty of people that wanted him dead here, but those people also had people that wanted them dead, so Jaskier trusted the ouroboros of assassination contracts the city provided. His workshop was in an old factory in East Ox, hidden to the untrained eye. He’d worked very hard to keep it that way. They stopped at a pub not too far from the workshop, instead of heading straight there.

“Why the wait?” Ciri asked, keeping her voice low. Jaskier kept his eyes down, sliding a bit of cash over to the barkeep.

“Could you keep the walk clear for ten minutes in about an hour?” he asked the woman.

“Hmph,” the woman said, taking the money and pointing at a nearby empty table. Jaskier and Ciri sat.

“Did that mean...she was going to go do what you asked her to, or did she just take your money and grunt?”

“Not in so many words.”

They ate and had a beer apiece, enjoying the atmosphere and the tinny music playing through the rusty old soundsystem, spliced from the city’s main siren system. When they were finished eating, the woman came to the table, and knocked twice on the wood as she took their empty bowls and mugs.

“Time to go.”

_ “Pzzht finally,” _ said a soft voice from Jaskier’s satchel.

The pair walked the eerily deserted road to the workshop. “I’ll explain inside,” Jaskier promised. His workshop was black-glassed, with three crooked chimneys on top, bars on the windows, and a rather large box affixed to the wall next to the front door. After an intricate set of locks were undone, a keypad, and what looked like a game of chess with a brick wall, they were permitted entry.

All the tables and larger machines were covered in large canvas cloths. “Thank you, Yennefer. Alright, don’t move until I say so.” Jaskier ran off, worrying the sorceress. She wasn’t supposed to let Jaskier out of her sight. There was a small grunt and a clanging, before Jaskier returned, wiping off his hands. “Alright, come on in. We’ll stay here tonight and return in the morning. You can take my bed, I’ve got some work to do before I can scrape this place clean.”

“How clean are we talking?” Ciri asked, looking out at the room and measuring with her fingers put in a three-quarter box. “Yeah, okay. Alright, I’m going to offer this just once. Oates will be the least of our problems if you agree, though.”

* * *

Eskel and Lambert were in the final stages of their rut when Vesemir and Geralt returned to the B&B. The pair, as much as they both hated portals, took the few quick steps through to the warehouse instead, where at least the sex was not heard this time.

They found Ciri and Jaskier in the office, laughing and quite definitely drunk off their asses. They couldn’t say anything that resembled words, just giggling and guffawing at whatever was said prior to the witchers’ arrival. They gawked at the pair, like they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

“You’re back!” Geralt recovered first. He scooped Jaskier up into his arms, spinning him around excitedly.

“D’make him spin, he’ll go train again,” Ciri insisted. “Keep on the ground for the artificerrrrrrr.”

“But I fly!” Jaskier exclaimed, hands going wide and nearly clipping Vesemir in the nose. “On the womp-womp!”

Ciri gave an excited gasp. “The womp-womp! I never got to try it!” She attempted to stumble to the hooks where the harnesses for the zipline were held, but Vesemir stopped her. She pouted. “You don’t want me to fly…”

“Ciri can’t fly…” Jaskier pouted. Geralt just laughed, holding his drunk sock of an omega.

“I think it’s time for all good artificers and time-traveling witchers to get in their beds,” Vesemir said, his face softening around the two’s shenanigans. It seemed that their antics weren’t as unbearable as he thought they would be. “I’ll handle the artifact. Geralt, can you—?”

“I can. Come on, back home we go.”

“D’wanna go home, just came from home, then  _ zip!  _ back in warehouse! Don’t wanna zip again.”

“No more zip,” Ciri promised, petting Jaskier’s face.

“One more zip, gotta go through this zip, let’s go.” Geralt herded the pair through the portal, Jaskier’s lips on his neck and his whole body pressed against him.

The moment they were out of sight, Vesemir sighed, smiling, and walked down to the floor. Something was telling him he should check on the engine room, for some reason.

When he opened the door, he was greeted by a  _ “Pzzht guess where I’ve been!” _

Vesemir somehow ignored that, and gaped in awe for all of three minutes before swearing loudly.

* * *

A hungover Ciri and Jaskier, and a post-rut Eskel and Lambert made the breakfast table seem more like a funeral than a meal. Jaskier dutifully spooned oats into his mouth, Ciri drank a raw egg, and Lambert and Eskel slept on their plates of bacon. Geralt and Triss were  _ delighted. _

“I was thinking about Ciri’s prophecy,” Triss said, taking a stillshot of the miserable quartet with a kinetoscope. Geralt, dressed in comfortable clothes, still endlessly happy from the night he spent keeping Jaskier and Ciri in his arms and out of trouble, just hummed.

“What about it?”

“She mentioned that the warehouse was mated. But it obviously isn’t. What if we have to...I don’t know, help it along?”

“Are we going to get real estate investors up here reading profiles of property the warehouse can mate with?” Geralt asked.

“No, don’t be silly. She has standards. I don’t think...oh.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t think she’ll mate with someone outside of pack.”

“...Oh.”

“Where are those two?!” Vesemir shouted, walking through the portal. He’d spent several hours steaming in his confusion, letting it boil down to finger-pointing anger by the time he came back to the B&B.

Those at the table groaned at his shouting. Vesemir rounded the corner to the breakfast nook and glared, hands on his hips. “You look upset,” Geralt said unhelpfully.

“I look like I deserve an explanation as to why there is a  _ new building in the warehouse.” _

“A  _ what?” _

* * *

A large, black-glassed, barred-window, thrice-crooked chimneyed building with a large box next to the front door sat in the space next to the engine room, which had, until last night, been completely empty. The whole group stared at it, wondering at its existence, at its presence. “Is that what you and Vesemir picked up from Hertch?”

“Glad to see you’re reading my reports. And no, it was not,” Geralt said, arms crossed.

Ciri and Jaskier were trying their best not to look at it.

“Cat got your tongue, o great artificer?” Vesemir asked snidely.

“Erm. I think the—” Jaskier cleared his throat. “Is it hot in here? I think the um. It. Speaks for itself, don’t you Ciri?”

“I think it does,” she said coolly.

“And just  _ how _ did this get here?” Vesemir asked, squinting at her.

“Same way we brought the tower of Aretuza here.”

“The same way we—that was an army of sorceresses and it nearly crushed the warehouse due to a calculation error!”

“Slight calculation error.”

“Ciri,” Geralt said, frowning. “Did you portal Jaskier’s workshop into the warehouse?”

“I missed you?” she tried.

“You may be over six hundred, and you may be an adult to anyone outside these walls, but you two are grounded. Forever.”

Jaskier groaned, indignant.

“But it was faster!”

“And you two will be doing all of the inventory for that monstrosity. Starting now. Hop to it. And apologize to Oates!”

“Whatever he said, he’s lying.”

“I’m more willing to trust a mostly-dead semi-possessed data reader than I am willing to trust you two reckless…” Vesemir turned redder the longer he had to think to come up with a word for the two of them. “...fuckers!”

Ciri and Jaskier turned to each other, and grinned for the first time that morning. “Fuckers!” they said cheerfully.


	6. #A-J002: ALERT - Artificer Banned From Workspaces UFN

Although it had been months since Jaskier had last been inside his workshop, he still knew it inside and out, upside down and backwards, and inventorying for it moved fairly fast. The only problem was that, due to the security mechanisms still in place, no one could visit him as often as when he worked in the engine room. The environment meant he lost himself to long hours spent in solitude, tinkering away with things as he inventoried. Perhaps he should’ve disabled the boobytraps.

Geralt grew worried when Jaskier didn’t return to the B&B at the end of the night anymore. Inexplicably, the utilities of the workshop were still in working order, most likely as a result of Jaskier’s positive relationship with the warehouse. He’d see the artificer for breakfast, sometimes, and would leave him lunch and dinner outside of the black-glassed building, but hardly saw hide or tail of him at all.

They missed one another something fierce, but the singular focus on the inventorying task kept them apart.

That was, at least, until the warehouse decided to lock Jaskier out. He spent thirty minutes trying every trick he had to get the front door open but gave up with a weary sigh when he realized it was fruitless. He couldn’t even look in through the windows. He supposed inventorying was on an indefinite hiatus.

He returned to his room in the B&B much later to find something he hadn’t expected. There, curled up in his bed, was Geralt of Rivia. He was fast asleep and frowning as he clutched at one of Jaskier’s pillows, and Jaskier was drawn to him like a moth to a flame. He shed his shoes and work clothes, eyes never leaving the witcher as he quietly snuck into bed with him. Geralt was warm, of course, and smelled perfect. Jaskier made a small, needy noise in the back of his throat and snuggled up. In his sleep, Geralt pulled his arms around Jaskier, keeping him close even unconsciously.

Jaskier was asleep in seconds.

His dreams were not the fitful type he had when sleeping in the warehouse, nor the restless type he had over the last few weeks. He did not dream, for he had everything he wanted right here.

Geralt came to in the early minutes before sunrise and forced himself not to jerk in surprise. He had a very comfortable, very sleepy omega in his arms, and had to blink a few times to convince himself this wasn’t a dream. Selfishly, indulgently, he leaned in and breathed in his scent. He’d been kipping in Jaskier’s bed for a few hours each night, but his scent had started to fade in that time. Jaskier smelled like warm bread and electricity, simultaneously the scents of home and adventure. Geralt ran a hand over his shoulders, noting the new definition in his muscles. He’s sure if he were to get his hands on Jaskier’s legs, they’d be even more muscled, from his time walking around the warehouse.

Pulling back a little, he could see the dark circles under Jaskier’s eyes, present even in sleep. His lips were chapped and over-bitten, bruised in some places from his worrisome habit of chewing on them while he worked out a problem. His hair was in dire need of a wash, as was the rest of him, but Geralt didn’t quite mind. He was here, and that was all that mattered. He indulged himself with a precious kiss to Jaskier’s forehead. He was running a bit hot, probably his body trying to tell him to rest.

He’d need a word with Vesemir.

* * *

Jaskier awoke to an empty bed that either definitely smelled of Geralt, or he’d finally lost his marbles. He yawned widely, his jaw cracking a little bit as he stretched. It was well after sunrise, just about time for breakfast. He was about to get out of bed, when Geralt walked in, post-shower and practically mad with happiness.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

Jaskier blushed, trying not to look too hard at the shine on his muscles, still wet from his shower, trying not to look at the perfectly-formed shoulders, trying not to look anywhere but his face, which was still quite handsome enough to blush at. His peripheral vision was having a grand old time.

“You came back last night,” Geralt said, still holding the towel around his waist.

“Oh, I,” Jaskier blushed again, looking down. “The warehouse kind of. Kicked me out?” 

“She probably knew I missed you.”

Jaskier was taken aback by Geralt’s casual admittance of affection, and he somewhat gaped at the man. For as long as Jaskier had known him, Geralt had been somewhat of an enigma. He had a rather catchy nickname from his Witchering days, but didn’t like to talk about them. He’d lived over seven centuries, but never reminisced out loud like the others. His daughter and his relationship with Yennefer were the only thing he’d talk about, and never at length. Jaskier had assumed that Geralt was either extremely uncomfortable speaking about himself, or (wrongly) lacked the vocabulary for what he felt.

“I missed you too,” Jaskier said, the words pulled from his mouth by an unseen force. Emotion swelled in his chest, and the truth of his declaration settled there like a warm, heavy weight. Geralt looked at him with affection and adoration, open in the softness of the morning light.

“Come here,” Geralt said gently. Jaskier stood and came closer, like he was in a trance. Geralt, one-handed, pulled him in by his waist and pressed their bodies together, his shower-warm, and Jaskier’s sleep-warm. He had barely enough time to melt before Geralt was kissing his lips with an aching care, like Jaskier would break under his touch.

How he was able to stay away for so long was beyond Jaskier’s reasoning.

“You should get ready. We have plans.”

“We do?” Jaskier asked dreamily, still swooning in Geralt’s hold.

“We do. Dress comfortably. We’ll be walking for a bit.”

* * *

Geralt was waiting with a picnic basket, of all things, when Jaskier came down the stairs. He frowned in confusion. “I thought we were going to the warehouse.”

“I managed to get you time off for good behavior,” Geralt grinned. “Let’s go.”

They set off on a small trail that wound from behind the B&B and into the forest. The trees were so thick and old that within a few steps, they could’ve been miles deep and Jaskier wouldn’t have known. The change of scenery was nice, as was watching Geralt’s tight little behind as he walked in front of him.

Geralt was in a light linen shirt, a little out of fashion, but he was a timeless creature, and it looked wonderful. It cinched in at his waist, a pair of tight. high-belted trousers buttoned up left of center. He looked like the dreams of sky pirates Jaskier used to have in those lonely nights in his workshop, down to the sturdy leather boots. He only took one sword this time, clearly not expecting danger, but not willing to walk into the wilderness unprepared.

They stayed quiet as they walked. It wasn’t the terrible pace Geralt took up the trail to Kaer Morhen, but more leisurely. Again, Jaskier was at a bit of a loss. Geralt never seemed the kind of man to dawdle to his destination, preferring to get there as quickly as possible and back in the same manner. A few times, Geralt pointed out some of the more interesting bits of nature, warning of the beautifully dangerous, and pointing out the dangerously beautiful. Jaskier forgot the world of gears and steam and machinery for a few hours, and felt his soul replenish itself in the dappled sunlight shining through the trees and onto the trail.

A river, calm and pristine, cut in on their path, but had made a bit of an island at the center. “Take my hand,” Geralt said, holding out the hand not carrying the basket. Jaskier took it without a second’s hesitation. “We’re going to jump.”

“We’re going to—?!” he managed to get his legs moving as they picked up speed and leapt to the island. When they landed, and when his heart stopped pounding after a few seconds, Jaskier looked around.

It was a fairly uninteresting bit of land, shaped a bit like a stylized eye. It was covered in soft meadow grass, and bare except for a large, healthy tree and a few stones embedded in the earth beneath it, a divine picnic spot. It’s where Geralt spread out a large blanket and set down the basket and his sword. When Geralt sat, he patted the spot next to him, which Jaskier took instantly. Overcome with emotion and appreciation, Jaskier kissed his cheek swiftly, a small blush on his cheeks.

Geralt turned his head and caught the artificer’s lips, cupping his face gently for a true kiss. Jaskier’s hand caught in the flowy fabric of Geralt’s shirt, grasping for something to ground him in this moment forever. Geralt didn’t stop kissing him, but didn’t deepen it. Today was a lazy day, meant for indulgence, and no expectations. The witcher was glad he didn’t have to spell it out for him.

Their gentle kisses were interrupted by Jaskier’s stomach rather loudly protesting the lack of breakfast they’d set out with. Jaskier hid his face in embarrassment, but Geralt only laughed and kissed his temple, turning to the basket.

“Here,” Geralt said softly, holding out a wrapped sandwich. Jaskier hadn’t held the basket, but just from the brief glance, he was able to see that Geralt planned to be out here for awhile, with all the things he’d packed.

They ate in a comfortable silence for a time, before Jaskier tugged off his shoes and socks, and rolled up his trousers so he could wade into the river. The sun sparkled on the surface, casting dancing light up his calves. Geralt was happy to see that his predictions about the man’s legs were right - he’d gained quite a bit of muscle definition in the time he’d been working in the warehouse. He watched him walk around, picking up stones and skipping them downcurrent, laughing in triumph when they’d skip more than a half-dozen times over the lazy river.

They didn’t talk about why they needed this. Jaskier’s laughter, rusty-sounding as it was, and the stretch in his face from smiling for the first time in days, was reason enough. Jaskier returned to Geralt, a little sunburnt and glowing with joy, and flopped down beside him.

“I love today,” Jaskier sighed happily, putting his head in Geralt’s lap and taking a deep breath. He closed his eyes and smiled. Geralt had never been more besotted with him than he was right then.

“I’m glad,” Geralt said, carding his fingers through Jaskier’s hair and scratching at his scalp. His hair, wet from the shower that morning, was now dry from his time in the sun, and had a bit of a wild wave to it that Geralt hadn’t seen before, combed and tamed as it had been while Jaskier had been working at the warehouse. Away from all pretense of professionalism, Jaskier was a happy ball of omega, affectionate and loose-limbed.

It made Geralt think of what his heat would be like, if Jaskier had one. He’d known a few omega men who’d gone under the knife to hide as much of their dynamics as possible. As an alpha who’d lived through several generations of prejudice and hatred, cycling between the dynamics, he understood it, but was saddened by it all the same. Some omegas had even gotten a surgical mating mark, to keep their hormones under control by use of tinctures and salves that would replicate and replace the need to submit to anyone else.

Geralt’s fingers traced over the smooth skin covering Jaskier’s pulse, the traditional spot to leave a mark. Were he to mate with him, he’d have to be very gentle. It’d been a long time since he’d been with an omega, and they were always fearful of his strength and power, which is why it was so rare for him to have this, or even let himself think of having this.

Jaskier felt the alpha’s touch for what it was: idle daydreams, stories of being mated and living for and with another. He’d been a skittish boy after finding out his dynamic, and had never been with an alpha for fear of losing his freedom. It had irked him so much when the alphas of Kaer Morhen had so openly opposed him going out on his own, and the more he thought about it, the more it grated on his senses to be kept grounded, leashed between two places, and just enough slack to walk himself there on his own.

A third moment of epiphany came to him, then. Geralt wasn’t taking him out just for his own alpha instincts to spend time with Jaskier. What was it he’d said?  _ I managed to get you time off for good behavior. _ He’d gone up against another alpha’s orders and gotten him free of the day’s duties, and taken the omega out in the wilderness because he thought Jaskier would like it.

“You look like you’re thinking too hard for a day off,” Geralt remarked casually, still stroking his hair. Jaskier blinked his eyes open at him, refocusing from the lazy contentedness that had leeched in.

“Just thinking about how strange you are, is all,” Jaskier said with a smile, so Geralt would know he was teasing. “No alpha would...no alpha has treated me like you do, ever in my life.”

“It’s basic decency, Jaskier. I care for you, and you needed a break. Perhaps…” he sighed and pursed his lips, before letting vulnerability speak. “Perhaps I was being a bit selfish. I wanted all your time, after so long apart. If that’s from the alpha part of me, or just my heart’s desire, I don’t know, but both are satisfied and happy from seeing you relaxed like this.” His hand traced down from Jaskier’s neck to his collarbone, flirtatiously petting over the edge of his chest hair, peeking out from under his shirt. Jaskier preened at the attention.

“Whoever’s at the reins, you should let them drive more often,” Jaskier flirted back, batting his eyes.

“Maybe I will.” Geralt grinned, lopsided and beautiful, and leaned down to steal another kiss from Jaskier’s lips. “I don’t think I’ve been this relaxed all week,” he groaned, sitting back. “It was so loud in the house with you gone.”

“That seems a bit strange. You’d think it would be quieter,” Jaskier said with a frown.

“You’d think,” Geralt repeated. “Eskel and Lambert were in their ruts pretty much from the second you and Ciri left.” Jaskier’s whole body tensed in shock at the taboo. “What is it? Did I say something wrong?” Geralt asked quickly.

“You don’t—why would you—it’s-it’s-it’s  _ impolite _ to talk about—” he sputtered.

Geralt got the picture rather quickly. In his time, talking about heats and ruts and cycles had been taboo and regular conversation many times over, and had just not bothered to check what was in fashion or  _ polite _ before opening his mouth. He felt shame swell up in his chest a little bit, and took a breath.

“I apologize, Jaskier. I didn’t mean to offend.”

Jaskier was still a bit squirmy. He was raised to ignore one’s own urges until the precise moment they could not be ignored anymore, and had even thought about undergoing those elective surgeries Geralt had sadly thought about. “It’s fine,” Jaskier assured. “I just didn’t expect it. Um. Is this a…oh, forgive me. Is that a normal topic of conversation among…?”

“Everyone? Oh, pretty much. We’ve known each other for centuries, there are not many secrets we don’t know about.” Geralt let Jaskier sit up next to him.

“Was this sort of a way to talk about my-my-my,” Jaskier swallowed. “My  _ heat?” _

“No!” Geralt said instantly, not wanting to make the omega uncomfortable. “I don’t know what the others have told you about me, but—”

“No!” Jaskier exclaimed this time. “It wasn’t that I thought you were going to—”

“I would never insult you like that—”

“I mean not that it’s not on the table, I just wanted to be able to get to know you more, and—”

“I mean you don’t have to, I would be honored to, and—”

“They did tell me you were a very good alpha to have a heat with, though.” Jaskier blushed shyly and picked at the grass.

That stopped Geralt in his tracks. “They did? I mean of course they did, I would be. I mean. I am. Uh.”

“When’s the last time you were a heat partner?” Jaskier asked curiously, now that they’d entered feet-first into taboo territory.

“Oh, I don’t know, something like two hundred and thirteen years, eight months.” Geralt’s eyes grew wide, and he buried his face in his hands. “I’m so sorry, Jaskier. I’m...I’m not this much of a mess, I promise.”

Jaskier just laughed in delight. “Don’t worry! I know you’re not. We’re wading through these waters together. I just. Oh, we’re both a bit messy, aren’t we.”

They looked at each other for a few seconds before bursting out in laughter. Jaskier snuggled back up with Geralt and they spread out on the blanket, still laughing a little.

“It’s not...soon. But I’m glad for that. I’d like to at least um.”

“Be with me outside of the haze?”

“Yes. Thank you.” Jaskier kissed the side of his neck. “I don’t know why society insists we need to bumble through this kind of conversation. We’d have been making metaphors and euphemisms right until it started, were we not so frank.”

“I tend to forget what’s in fashion quite often,” Geralt grumbled. “Forty years ago, there was no problem asking complete strangers how long their heats lasted. It was more of a scandal to be coy than to overshare.”

“How dreadful it must be, for you to navigate social intricacies when you’re just trying to keep the world safe.” Jaskier propped himself up on one elbow and leaned over Geralt. “Good thing I’m here, then.”

And then they didn’t talk for awhile, mouths too occupied with other activities.

* * *

They returned to the B&B around dusk, clothes rumpled and both of them a bit sunburnt. Geralt went up to shower while Jaskier checked his datareader for any messages.

There was one waiting in his inbox, from Yennefer.

_ We should talk about putting your more unconventional skills into practice. We’ll meet tomorrow. _

It made his heart sink in his chest as he tapped out an affirmative to the sorceress.

* * *

The meeting wasn’t as bad as Jaskier thought it could be. Yennefer had taken him aside after their morning brief at breakfast, and walked with him through the garden.

“I trust you remember the manner in which we found you,” she began, tone giving away nothing.

“Yes, I think I’ll remember that to my grave. It is, in fact, why I’m here.”

“Indeed,” Yennefer stopped. “I’d prefer if we had no extra ears listening to our conversation, Lambert,” she said, raising her voice a bit.

The bashful witcher stepped out of the bushes and sulked back to the house.

“How could you tell he was there?” Jaskier asked, pulling out a seat at an iron garden table for her. She sat with grace and elegance before he went to sit on the other side.

“Instinct. And he’s a bit nosey, not to mention.”

“Right. You’re magical, I must keep reminding myself.”

“Let’s stop beating around the bush, Jaskier. You managed to splice into the warehouse’s systems, and got closer to finding an artifact using our methods than any human has in years. Adding to your history as a rather accomplished cat burglar, I think it’s time you went out into the field.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EXPECT MORE CHAPTERS TODAY YOLO


	7. #WH-23-0002: "Horse"; #S-84-788-012H: Top Hat, Disguising

_ “...I think it’s time you went out into the field.” _

Jaskier’s mind filled with panic, eyes flicking to the side for any way out of this. “Do I have a say in this at all?” he asked in a weak voice.

“You can say no, but this artifact we’ve found requires no short amount of tact, and to be frank, your skillset would make the entire operation even easier for us.” She watched him with those attentive violet eyes. “So really, no.”

“Ah,” Jaskier gulped, looking away. He folded his hands in his lap, wishing for something else to fidget with and hide behind. Yennefer was good at this, he realized. She was able to get people to answer her without asking a question at all. “And there’s no way I could consult on it from afar, like Vesemir does?”

“No. Our research says that there are several high-sensitivity triggers protecting the artifact, but it’s being moved from one location to the next by...let’s call them competition.”

“Nilfgaard?” Jaskier asked. Yennefer seemed surprised he knew the name. The country itself hadn’t been around for centuries, and had dissolved into a series of companies and semi-legitimate entities that allowed them to grasp more of the Continent than owning land and armies would do.

“Precisely. This...asset would be better kept in our warehouse, and as you know, we have no intention on using what we have.”

“I understand that.” Jaskier sighed and looked out at the garden, frowning. “I thought I’d never have to do something like this again. In fact, I remember you intimating as much to me when you bullied me into this job.”

“You had the option of walking away,” Yennefer pointed out.

“Yeah, with my memories wiped!”

“A small consolation for what you did,” she said with an infuriating smile. “Besides, knowing what you do now, and feeling as you do now about the warehouse, would you let anyone just walk away from what you were able to do?”

Jaskier scowled at his hands on the table. “No,” he admitted with reluctance. “But that doesn’t change the fact you said I didn’t have to—” he lowered his voice, even knowing no one else was around. He didn’t like saying it very loud. “You said I didn’t have to break into anything anymore just to feed myself.”

“And you don’t. Unless you’re displeased with your salary, and accommodations here.” She raised an eyebrow.

Jaskier was stuck.

“What if something goes wrong?” he asks, getting closer to the end of this negotiation.

“You’ll have Ciri with you in the field. I think you said, if there’s any trouble, she’d be able to zip you out of it?”

_ Check. _

“And Ciri can’t extract the...asset?”

“Portal jumping can only take you so far. And as far as she knows, she knows the inside of the truck transporting it. She doesn’t know the inside of the secure boxes.”

_ Mate. _

“Fine.”

* * *

“In the field?” Geralt and Vesemir asked as one. Geralt looked stricken, and Vesemir just looked put-out.

“Yes, in the field,” Jaskier sighed.

“With Ciri?” the alphas said, again in unison.

“With Ciri.”

“To retrieve an artifact?” Geralt asked, looking a bit ill.

“Yes, that’s typically what warehouse agents do out in the field. Listen, I already tried to talk Yennefer out of it, but she already had every counter to my moves. I’m sure she’d be able to convince you how she convinced me, easily.

“What if something goes wrong?”

“We’ll have you on back-end, and Ciri ready to evac at a moment’s notice.”

“But why now? I thought you were just hired to...artifice.” Vesemir sounded like the word itself tasted nasty.

“So did I, o great overseer.” Jaskier sighed again and gave up, slouching in a chair. “Hopefully, for all our sakes, it will be a one-off, and I’ll be allowed back in the workshop when I get back.”

“It’s certainly not going to inventory itself,” Vesemir grumbled under his breath. Geralt shot him a glare before looking worriedly at Jaskier.

“I don’t—I don’t mean to come across as overbearing or condescending but—”

“I know I have none of the skills you do. I know I’m not able to get others to cow just from using my voice on them, but...I’m also kind of excited? To be able to see what you do out there.” He gave a small smile, and Geralt couldn’t help pulling him into his arms.

“If you’re hurt whatsoever, I’m going to give Yen a piece of my mind.”

“I’m sure she’s ready for that eventuality as well,” Jaskier said into Geralt’s chest, holding him tight, despite his previous confidence. He’d seen the injuries the others came home with, heard the stories of missions gone wrong. He didn’t have the potions or powers or healing abilities the others did to be able to recover from mistakes or mishaps. If he was hurt out there, it was likely to ground him for life.

“I don’t like not going with you a second time,” Geralt grumbled, sounding a bit like his mentor.

“We’ll have our chance to, I’m sure.” For all he loved the idea of going out into the world, hunting for an artifact with Geralt, he hoped he didn’t have to do so too soon.

“Let me at least teach you a few things before you go.”

“Our train leaves in the morning, can we do it at our usual cards time?”

* * *

Dinner was spent ribbing Jaskier to no end, grilling him on his knowledge of the retrieval process, which he recited perfectly, as he’d panicked while reading the guide he’d been given. Eskel had apparently written it, which was most likely the reason for the less-than-technical descriptions of protocol.

Geralt led the way into his room afterwards, and asked, “Do you still have the knife I gave you when you went to Oxenfurt?”

“Of course. I don’t think I’ll be using it, though. At least I hope not.” He felt a little ill at the idea of having to use deadly force against another person. He was never the most steady around blood.

“Let me show you some basic grips, first.”

Hammer grip, saber grip, and reverse grip, edge out later, Jaskier was decidedly taught enough that Geralt put the knife down for the evening. He pulled Jaskier into his arms, who was a little confused.

“Is...this part of your training?”

“No.” He said no more. Jaskier relaxed into the hug, finally realizing what it was.

“Can I sleep in your bed tonight?” he asked.

“Uh, sure. I can take the floor, and—”

“I meant with you, Geralt.” Jaskier looked up at the alpha, and noted the surprise on his face.

“O-of course,” Geralt said, blinking down at him like he wasn’t quite sure if he was real.

It was kind of awkward, getting there, but the moment they were both under the covers, Jaskier latched onto his side like there was nowhere else he could stand to be. He pressed kisses to Geralt’s shoulder and flexed his hands, a bit sore from gripping the knife too hard. “You’re nervous,” Geralt said softly.

“How can you tell?” Jaskier mumbled.

“Can smell it on you.”

“What?”

“Witcher thing.”

“Oh.” Jaskier sighed again and looked up at him, though he couldn’t see very well in the dark. “I am. I don’t want to mess up, but I also don’t want to do so well that this becomes a permanent thing.”

“I understand that. Can I tell you about my first contract I ever took?”

“Witchers took contracts?” Jaskier grinned, imagining Geralt having to do something so menial as  _ paperwork _ while fighting and hunting monsters.

“Nothing like what you think. It was a verbal agreement most of the time, which is how I got stiffed out of a lot of money most of the time.” Jaskier felt a surge of indignance for the injustice against Geralt, but kept quiet as Geralt kept talking. “I was hired to take out a werewolf. I thought to myself, ‘great, I know all about werewolves,’ but I forgot that I was also hunting just...a man. A regular man, in unfortunate circumstances that he needed a Witcher to cut him down.”

“What happened to him?”

“I had been thinking about what to do about the monster the whole time, that by the time I came upon him, he was out of his shifted form, just naked and dirty and hungry by a river. He was singing a song, some Elvish one I can’t remember. And he looked at me, and everything my senses were telling me was wrong, conflicting with one another. He smelled like a werewolf, his blood moved in his body, I heard his heart beating like a mutant. Yet I saw a pitiful man, heard him singing. I froze, because I hadn’t been able to differentiate, or rather marry the two forms in my head until then.

“And then he attacked me. I’d grabbed the wrong sword - steel for men and animals, when I needed silver for monsters. It made me think before I leapt for every situation after that.”

Jaskier took in a shuddering breath. “That’s…” he cleared his throat. “Forgive me, but was that supposed to help me?”

Geralt gave a chuckle. “You are the opposite of me. You see things in a different light already, you see a pocketwatch and think ‘that’s going to kill me’. You’ve been thinking before you jump your entire life. I think the best thing you can do is to just trust your instincts and—”

“Take a leap of faith?”

“Yes.”

Jaskier studied Geralt, thinking for a while. “That seems reckless.”

“You seem reckless, when you want to be.”

Jaskier scoffed. “Touché.”

“Get some sleep, Jaskier.”

“You first, witcher.”

* * *

The morning was dreary, but Jaskier was filled with jittery excitement. He could barely eat his breakfast, and was astonished at how Ciri was able to be so cool-headed and relaxed. She even seemed to take her time with her coffee just to make him frustrated. The others were amused at his nervousness. Geralt just gave him a knowing smile, conveying that he had the utmost confidence in him, and that nothing he did out there would disappoint him, so long as he came back in one piece.

“You ready?” Ciri asked, as soon as her coffee was done. There was a strange cube by the door, which Ciri picked up without further comment.

Jaskier nodded, not trusting his voice at all. He had a small satchel of probably too many supplies, but when Yennefer had said the systems would be “variable” and require “a bit of improvisation”, he erred on the side of overpreparation than not.

“Alright, let’s go.” Ciri blew a kiss to her uncles and took Jaskier’s arm. The last thing he saw before he was zipped through a lime-green portal was Geralt’s smile.

* * *

“So,” Ciri started with a smile, once they were settled on the train. They’d be taking it up to halfway between the third and fourth stops on the rail line, and then jumping from the train so they wouldn’t be detected closer to their intended location.

“So?” Jaskier fidgeted with his satchel.

“Have you fucked him yet?”

The moment would have only been made more theatrical were Jaskier drinking from a cup.

“What is it with all of you and…” he looked around, making sure no one was near. All the same, he whispered,  _ “Lewd topics?” _

Ciri laughed, loud and beautiful. Several people looked over, but quickly went back to what they were doing. Ciri was a gift just to be around.

When you weren’t subjected to her line of interrogation, of course.

“Well? What’s the answer?” she asked, green eyes sparkling with mirth.

Jaskier huffed and crossed his arms. “No. We have not. I’m sure, had this...trip not come up, we would have gotten  _ somewhere, _ but…”

“Artifacts come first,” Ciri nodded in agreement. “But it sounds like you’ve talked about it?”

Jaskier recounted the story to her, leaving some parts for himself, like sharing the bed the previous night. In all honesty, if Geralt and the other witchers could smell  _ nervousness _ on him, they’d be able to tell who Jaskier spent the night with easily enough.

By the end of the story, Ciri was smiling softly, adoringly, just like her father. “You two are going to be very good together, if the whole warehouse thing works out.”

That shook Jaskier from his thoughts. “The what? What warehouse thing. Is this another one of your…” he made a motion with his hands that could have possibly meant  _ visions, _ but came across more like  _ elaborate updo. _

“No, not as such. But I’ve gotten a bit of clarity on it from Triss. She mentioned that the mate was someone already in the pack, and I remembered that the bond felt like and alpha with an omega.”

Jaskier’s blood went cold. “You’re not implying that…” Ciri gave him a shrug. “I am  _ not _ going to  _ mate _ with a  _ building, _ Ciri!” he hissed.

“Again, we’ll just have to see. Visions aren’t exactly known as being clear, or straightforward. All I know is the feeling I got, and it was an alpha-omega mated pair, and the alpha was the warehouse.”

“Fucking—” Jaskier bit down on his knuckles. “Now I have this whole thing to worry about,  _ and _ potentially getting mated to a massive, magical warehouse.”

“One thing at a time, o great artificer.”

* * *

Jumping from the train was a rather thrilling affair, even if they were moving fairly slow to begin with. They walked about three miles through a forest before Ciri held up a hand. Jaskier screeched to a halt and looked around. “What is it? Is it Nilfgaard? Are they here? Can they see us?”

“Shh,” Ciri said, head on a swivel. “There’s a horse farm near here.”

Jaskier made a bewildered noise. What does horse farming have to do with anything?! Ciri strode off in what was probably the direction of the horse farm, leaving Jaskier to catch up in a mad scramble.

Sure enough, there was a horse farm...in the middle of a forest. Jaskier saw two massive transport trucks near the barn, and they watched them for a while with some birefringent binoculars. “I’m not sure what this means, but...I don’t think there’s anyone here.” Jaskier handed his pair over to Ciri, who looked around the place, scanning through walls, even down underground a bit, but she came up with nothing as well.

“Stay here,” she whispered, before handing back the binoculars and zipping out.

“Right.” Jaskier chewed his lip and looked around. A horse trailer was parked nearby, and something in his gut said he should go take a look.

_ Leap of faith, right… _

Jaskier took quick, quiet steps over to the trailer, which was covered in opaque glass, and about twice the size as a regular horse trailer. Jaskier, of course, didn’t know this, being a city boy, and approached it with little to no suspicion.

The front gate was locked by a series of complicated mechanisms, which didn’t sit right with him. He took a glance back at where Ciri had left him, but she hadn’t returned yet, so he pulled out his supplies, splicing into a panel with ease, glancing between the giant padlock he was working on and the gears behind the panel.

He gave a little gasp of success when he managed to get three of the four locks open. He looked around. Still no Ciri yet. At least this would be a good warmup for when they had to go break into the trucks. He fiddled with the last lock, using a reverse-pressure trick he’d learned while inventing fingerprint scanners a few years ago. The lock clicked open, and he pulled the lever to open the door.

The sound of Ciri  _ zzzzipp _ ing up behind him made him jump, turning around before he could see what was inside. Ciri’s usual mask of neutral curiosity was gone, replaced with a look of shock and fear. “Jaskier,” she whispered, looking not at him, but several feet above him. Her voice shook.

“What?” Jaskier said, freezing in place.

“D-don’t move.”

The pair stood in silence for a moment, before Jaskier felt something  _ big _ move behind him. He bit his lip so hard it actually hurt, and was so tense, that when a massive hand came to rest on his head, followed by a loud hum, he shrieked.

Whirling around and backpedaling to Ciri, he saw what had frozen her in place.

It was...a horse.

Except it really, really wasn’t a horse.

It had four legs, like a horse. It had a tail, like a horse. It was white as snow, which Jaskier is sure some horses looked like. But when it came to the head, Jaskier was at a loss to even  _ call _ it a head, there were six arms. Six fully-formed, ginormous and muscled arms. At the top of them sat a massive bulbous  _ growth _ with...oh gods, it had  _ thirteen eyes. _

“Ciri?!” Jaskier wheezed, holding her tight.

“I think this is what killed the Nilfgaardians in the barn,” she said, gulping. The horse...thing stepped out of the trailer and stretched its arms, looking around at its surroundings.

“Dead. Barn right,” Jaskier babbled. “Barn go...now?!”

“Barn go now!” Ciri cried, screaming and taking Jaskier’s hand as they made a mad dash for the barn. The creature, surprised by this turn of events as much as they were, followed them quickly, as there was surely danger ahoof.

They made it to the barn, where there was just...carnage. Jaskier nearly vomited as they both slammed the barn doors shut, leaning against them. It rattled with the fury of six confused fists and one indignant hoof. “We can’t stay here forever. Can you—?!” Jaskier wanted to make a motion that could have meant  _ portal us somewhere that thing isn’t, _ but that thing was still trying to get in the barn with them.

“I can’t,” Ciri said. “My magic is...something’s sapping it.”

“You think it might be...that!?”

“Let’s go with yes.” She grunted as pieces of the barn door were ripped from their crossbeams. Jaskier watched with horror as one of the hands, a purplish-green color unlike anything he’d ever seen, reached in and felt around.

“Do we call Yen?” Jaskier said between shrieks.

“NO,” Ciri insisted. “Okay. What if we. Alright. I need you to trust me.”

“Why does this already sound like a bad idea?”

“I’m going to open the door, and you run in front of it, and I’ll...do something.”

“SOMETHING?!” Jaskier bellowed. More of the barn was torn away. “Fine. Do it now. If I die, there’s a specific song I want you to sing at my funeral—”

“Okay go!” Ciri threw the door open, and Jaskier sprinted out from it, toward the treeline. He heard hooves behind him, and pumped his arms faster, eager to get away from it. He hoped Ciri did something fast.

Not fast enough.

Five arms gathered him up and lifted him into the air, holding him tightly. The sixth hand came to rest on his head like before, and his mind filled with that loud humming again. He wanted to scream, but didn’t when he heard the creature speak.

_ Why are you running? Is the Green One danger? _

Jaskier made a noise that sounded a bit like the time he’d choked on some homemade pea soup, and almost inhaled a spoon.

_ Calm, soft one. Calm. Greg has. _

The hand on his head petted him some more, and he made a tight noise.

Ciri came up, screaming his name in terror, seeing him caught. The creature turned to face her.

_ No more angry for Greg’s soft. Green One will go. _

“C-Ciri, it’s talking to me—”

_ Greg. _

“Greg is talking to me.”

Ciri made a face, hands still raised and glowing dimly. “Is it—”

_ GREG. _

“Greg! His name is Greg!” Jaskier shrieked.

“Is Greg hurting you?!”

_ No hurts for soft. Only pets. _

“No I’m okay, Ciri, he’s. Greg, will you tell us what happened to you?”

Jaskier was set down on the ground again, and he nearly collapsed, were it not for Ciri swooping in to support him under an arm. His legs were jelly. Greg extended two arms, both of them a deep midnight blue, and rested them atop their heads. The humming noise grew for a moment before receding, and Greg spoke.

_ Greg was free, in a mountain. Greg’s mountain. Black-suns came, Greg has no more mountain. Black-suns take Greg, hurt Greg’s mountain, take Greg here. Greg...avenge. _

“Avenge. Right. Barn. Dead barn,” Jaskier babbled.

_ Soft opens cage for Greg. Soft and Green One...run from Greg? _

He sounded so sad, that Ciri and Jaskier immediately held onto the hands on their heads. “No!! No, we were just, we thought you were—”

“Hungry! We thought you were hungry! We wanted to get you food.”

“Yes! Yes, we wanted to feed Greg!”

Greg’s humming grew a bit louder.

_ Soft and Green One need no avenge. _

“OhfuckingMelitelethankyousomuch,” Ciri whispered. “I...Greg, was there anything else here with you?”

_ Nothing but Greg. _

Ciri looked to Jaskier. “I think this was the ping.”

* * *

Convincing Greg to come with them to the warehouse was the easy part.

Yennefer was right, like always. It took no small amount of tact and stealth to complete the mission. Luckily, she’d given Ciri one of the artifacts they used to bring  _ other _ artifacts into the warehouse without being detected: a top hat, which looked like just a regular top hat, for all intents and purposes.

When the top hat was placed on something, it made that item look much less conspicuous to anyone that hadn’t seen the hat go on. For example, it made Geralt look like a little old lady, and made Ciri look like a plain-faced peasant with no apparent magical powers.

When Ciri and Jaskier put the top hat on Greg, it made him look like a very normal...dog.

Watching him weave between other people on the train car, before sitting in their now-very cramped cabin, Ciri and Jaskier knew they were going to be in trouble again when they got back. This time, they called ahead.

“How’s it looking out there?” Vesemir asked.

Ciri showed him the top-hat wearing dog. “You need to open another area of the stables.”

“What? It’s a dog.”

“He’s not a dog,” they said at the same time. Jaskier poured them some wine. Greg’s huge eyeballed head tilted forward to sniff at it.

“No, Greg this is not for you.”

Vesemir saw the dog put a paw on Jaskier’s head.

_ Greg want. _

“No.”

_ Give to Greg. _

“You said Greg subsists on the chaos of the universe, Greg does not get wine!”

Greg relented, and sulked.

_ Will avenge for this. _

Jaskier sighed and gave him the rest of the bottle.

“Did you just—Ciri, tell me he didn’t just give a dog a bottle of wine.”

_ “He’s not a dog.” _

* * *

They had to get creative to get Greg back to the warehouse. There was no way Ciri could portal him up there with her powers being zapped, and they couldn’t take any of the regular transportation back. They didn’t even know how Greg would fare going through a portal, Ciri-made or otherwise.

The not-horse that wasn’t a dog that looked like a dog put his paws on the agents’ heads again.

_ Greg can run to new mountain. _

“Oh, please don’t. We can’t keep up with you, Greg,” Jaskier pleaded, looking around. It was late enough that not too many people were milling around the station, but they had to be inconspicuous regardless. Who just lets their dog put their paws on their head?

_ Sit on Greg. _

“Jaskier, I think he wants us to ride him up there,” Ciri said in realization.

“What?”

_ Sit. _

Jaskier groaned. “Let’s move somewhere dark first, so we can take the hat off.”

They came to the last trailhead in Hertch, the one that led up to the B&B and Kaer Morhen. No one but the moon saw them remove the top hat. Greg morphed back into his natural form, shaking the magic off of him like it was water from a light rain.

“We’re in such trouble, aren’t we?” Jaskier said weakly.

“I don’t think they’ll let us go anywhere for the next hundred years.”

“Well then. Might as well ride the beast of our undoing up the mountain. Ladies first.”

Greg made sure to hang onto the agents as they got situated on his back. Then, he took off.

The forest blurred around them, air whipping like little knives across their skin. They held on for dear life, though they were screaming in terror the entire time. It felt a little like holding onto a refrigerator as it opened and closed, tumbling down a hill from a very high peak.

(When they passed the B&B, the group was dining al fresco for once, which meant they heard the oncoming and going of their screams as they went up the mountain.

Lambert joked, “Ciri and Jaskier must be back.”

They all laughed.

They shouldn’t have.)

“Ciri—!” Jaskier gasped. “The crystals! the-the-the BOMBS!”

That was right. The birefringent bombs around the castle normally were there to detect any intruders, and at the speed they were going, the keep would have definitely mistaken them all for intruders.

“Greg!” Ciri cried. “Greg! Slow down!”

_ GREG WANT GO FAAAAAST. _

“Please stop!” Jaskier begged.

_ Stop? _

“Stop!!” they cried. All at once, Greg’s hooves dug into the ground, leaving deep gouges in the earth, and the two agents would have rocketed off his back, had it not been for Greg’s hold on them. They held each other and wept in relief, seeing they’d stopped just before the line of crystal pillars.

“Alright, Greg, you need to move slowly. We’ll show you where to go.” Ciri sounded rather wrung out, sticks and leaves caught in her hair, her makeup streaked down her face from her eyes watering at the high speeds. Jaskier was almost catatonic. He was pretty sure Greg’s velocity has permanently straightened out the cowlick on the back of his head.

Greg obediently trotted up the trail, and there was a tense moment when the crystals all seemed to glare at the trio, but they passed without incident. Through the courtyard and down the stairs, carefully (very carefully) through the office where—

“What. Is. That.” Vesemir stood from his desk, arms crossed in a very obvious attempt not to grab his sword. Ciri was leading Greg by one hand, Jaskier by the other, and they froze.

Ciri held up the box they’d brought. “The top hat.”

“I meant the—”

“This is Greg. Greg, this is Vesemir. Did you clear out a place in the stable?”

“I—no. Are you—?”

“He’s fine. He says he’s going to sleep soon. We think he meant hibernating.”

“Hibernating?”

_ Like bears. _

“Like bears,” Jaskier said, still shellshocked from the ride up.

“I think I need to get Geralt in here.”

“Please do. He’ll calm down Roach.”

“He’s already down there.”

* * *

The stables at Kaer Morhen had once housed many horses and other beasts of burden, but were now empty. The stables of the warehouse, however, were home to exactly one inhabitant, and she had been well-deserved of her retirement.

The immortality and teleporting, however, were just a side effect of having traveled with Geralt for so long. She’d not had more visitors than the witchers in so long that she’d forgotten what it was like to look another monster in the face and just huff.

She remembered quickly enough, though.

“Geralt?” Ciri called as they neared the stables. “I need you to be very open-minded when we round the corner.”

“What did you do to Jas...kier.” Geralt’s face shifted into one of shock, like everyone else who first encountered Greg. “Uh.”

“This is Greg. He’s our friend. He’s staying in the stables. He’s promised not to hurt Roach.”

Roach huffed in Greg’s face when he came too close.

“Right.” Geralt said, still watching with wide eyes.

“He killed the Nilfgaardians who captured him, isn’t that great?” Ciri said, with forced excitement.

“Yes. That’s great. Was this...Was Greg who you—?”

“Who we pinged? Yes. Imagine our surprise.” Jaskier walked over, still silent, and buried himself in Geralt’s arms. Ciri continued. “We’ll explain later. He wants some hay and a good place to sleep. I’ll take care of it, you take care of Jaskier.”

“It better be a good explanation,” Geralt said over his shoulder.

He’d seen stranger.


	8. #S-44-0094-577T: Blanket, Cold (???)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for hypothermia, mild peril, burgling

Greg settled in nicely into the warehouse, against everyone’s expectations. Even Roach had been expecting a little more chaos from the creature. Ciri observed that the warehouse was as accepting of Greg as he was accepting of his new home. He hadn’t had a warehouse before, only mountains. Jaskier had promised that they wouldn’t let the black-suns take away the warehouse. Greg had been appeased by that and laid down to sleep for three months right in the middle of their conversation.

They had been in trouble, as they’d expected, but the mission was technically a success, even though the casualty count at the horse farm was fairly high. Vesemir refused to see it as “not their fault” and they just took the punishment as it was given.

Geralt still liked to sneak Jaskier (and sometimes Ciri) down to the picnic spot whenever he could. They both appreciated it, growing closer over their shared “time served.”

Yennefer hadn’t pulled Jaskier back into the field, but when the report was published for the other agents, she mentioned Jaskier’s skillset, and he knew his days of hiding were numbered thereafter.

Lambert, boldest of the witchers, approached him about it first.

“So how’d you spring the Greg?” he asked, munching into an apple as he cornered Jaskier.

“It was uh, several things. Just you know, pick a lock, splice here, there’s Greg!” he laughed nervously.

Lambert’s eyes narrowed. “You know we all know you tried breaking into the warehouse.”

Jaskier slumped in defeat. “I didn’t, you know, like. I didn’t mean to, at first. But it’s like, everything I found was…” he ran out of words.

“Incredible?” Lambert suggested. Jaskier nodded.

“The deeper I dug, the stranger things got, and normally I’d be finding the boring stuff, but I just kept finding things that drew me closer, until—”

“Until Yen caught you.”

“Until Yennefer caught me,” he agreed.

* * *

Eskel caught him next, tossing him a padded stack of report messages. “Found this. Thought you’d get a kick out of it.”

> _ TO: Office _ _  
>  _ _ FROM: S-98 “Databank” _ _  
>  _ _ MSG: Splice attempt successful. _

Jaskier read through the stack.  _ Splice attempt successful. Splice attempt successful. Splice attempt successful.  _ He blushed up to his ears. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Or do.” Eskel gestured at a table, where Jaskier’s lunch was held hostage next to Eskel’s lunch.

He sighed.

* * *

The sorceresses didn’t need to ask.

* * *

Vesemir had a desk drawer stuck one day, and shouted loud enough at it that Jaskier came running. “What’s going on?” Jaskier asked, panicked.

“Damned drawer,” Vesemir grunted. “You do the opening things you shouldn’t be, don’t you? Have at it.”

Jaskier glared at the open bottle of whiskey on the table, and the two empty glasses, and sighed. Why couldn’t witchers just be forthcoming?

* * *

There was one witcher who was characteristically frank with him, thankfully. 

Geralt was quietly poring over an ancient-looking book on Gwent strategy when Jaskier came into his room that evening, wrung out from the work whiskey and the “hmmm”s from the other witchers. He flopped down on the bed, face-down in a pillow.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Geralt asked. “I’ll keep my mouth shut about it if you feel better that way.”

“You’re all a bunch of gossipy little witchers, aren’t you?” Jaskier rolled his head to the side to glare at him half-heartedly. “I promise, it doesn’t get more interesting the more times I’m asked. I only have twenty years of life, you all have hundreds.”

Geralt came over and sat on the bed with him, manhandling the omega into place atop his lap. Jaskier blushed a little and hummed, pressing his face forward into Geralt’s neck. “If you’re going to ask, please be clear about what you’re asking. I spend all day deciphering machines, I don’t want to decipher leading questions for at least another week.”

The witcher chuckled and petted a hand down his back, rubbing away the tension in his shoulders and lower back. “I just want to know if you’d rather talk later about it, instead of now.”

“I’m more prepared for questions now, if you’d please.”

“Well, then.” Geralt moved the two of them so they were sitting up at the head of the bed, cuddled up like they were at the picnic island. “So you were a thief?”

“I suppose that’s the most accurate way of putting it.” Jaskier settled in, gripping Geralt’s shirt like he loved to do. “I was on my own since I was basically a child. I had to steal to stay alive, stay fed. I was taught maths and science and history at the Academy, not...you know, basic life skills. So I took.”

Geralt paused. “Your parents?”

“Sent me to the Academy when I was six. I can hardly remember their faces. When I was told I could cash out the remainder of my tuition money, I did, and bought the workshop. Had a place to live, a place to tinker, and enough left over that I could feed myself while I planned.”

“And you became an artificer.”

“I became an artificer.” Jaskier smiled fondly on the memory. “When I got good enough, I worked at a few shops, honing skills I’d bring back to my workshop. They all thought I was just some kid run off-leash, but I kept coming back until they started asking too much, too many questions.”

“Because of your parents…?”

“Because they would’ve sent me to the Oxenfurt orphanage.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It’s better this way, living like I was already dead, borrowing time, taking risks someone who had something to lose would never even consider.”

“You told Eskel you worked with some mob types. How’d that happen?”

“One of the risks I took. Several times, actually. They’d need security, or need to break security, so I started getting put in on heist jobs. It’s a lot easier to lower down a scrawny fifteen-year-old into a cage than it is to lower someone three times that weight.”

“Witchers are no stranger from taking morally-questionable jobs,” Geralt chuckled. He remembered several jobs from his youth, several deals taken, that he would have cringed over now. He’d been so proud of them.

“The more shady jobs I took, the more shady people wanted my work. Wanted me dead, too.” Geralt frowned. “I have more people that like me than want me dead, though. It’s a...weird cycle. I’m sure, were I still living in Oxenfurt, I’d probably be in some measure of trouble. I’m sure I still have debts outstanding to some people.”

“You won’t have to worry about paying them while you’re here with us,” Geralt vowed. “How’d you find out about the warehouse?”

“Something strange happened on a job. I was tasked with getting a necklace out of a case, but this...I think, sword on the wall, it started shaking and...it glowed a bright red. When I came to, I’d delivered the necklace, but the newspapers were saying the sword was stolen too. I didn’t have it. I searched everywhere in my workshop, I hadn’t taken it. That’s when I started looking into it. It was owned by quite the bloodthirsty king. He valued justice, and was intolerant on crime to the point where he would behead thiefs himself.”

“And you’d lost your head, so to speak.”

“Yeah.”

“That sounds like Vongut’s Broadsword.”

“Yeah! That was the guy!”

“It’s in the warehouse. Nabbed that one myself.”

“We must have missed each other by minutes, then.” Jaskier traced an invisible line down Geralt’s chest, kissing over his heart.

“Must have.”

Jaskier’s watch went off for dinner, and the conversation was forgotten for awhile. Later that night, resting in Geralt’s bed together, the witcher asked one more thing of him.

“Please don’t make risks like that anymore.”

* * *

Life was quiet. Suspiciously so.

The next ping came in from Yennefer, requesting Jaskier go back out into the field, this time with Geralt at his side.

“It’s at a museum. There’s a big gala event in two days, which should provide cover enough for you two to get in, grab it, and get out unseen.”

Jaskier looked over the field notes she’d prepared, frowning at the specifications.

“We don’t know what the artifact is?”

She shook her head. “All I know is three employees at the museum died from freezing to death, within a few days of one another. Vizima is going through a heat wave right now.”

Jaskier frowned down at the notes again. “Alright. We should go check out the place before we make any moves.”

* * *

Jaskier and Geralt visited the museum the day before the gala, purchasing tickets to see the collection like anyone else. “You know what would be useful? Attuning a device to pick up artifact-like radiation. That way we don’t have to scout for as long.”

“It’s that one,” Geralt said, indicating with a nod of his head over to a collection of recovered items from a shipwreck.

“How do you know?”

“We already have an attuned device.” Geralt winked down at the omega and they observed the display. Jaskier rolled his eyes.

“Which one is it?” Jaskier asked.

“The blanket. It was found around the shoulders of one of the people they found in the boat over our heads. They’d frozen to death, even though they were maybe fifty feet from shore.”

“That’s so sad,” Jaskier said softly. “And the workers, they...touched it?”

“I’m guessing so. We’ll have to take care extracting it.” Geralt turned to leave, but Jaskier caught his arm.

“We need to look at the rest of the collection,” Jaskier said, smiling through gritted teeth.

“Why?” Geralt shook his head.

“Because they’re going to remember a tall white-haired alpha and a short brunet omega lingering around the display that gets robbed.” Geralt considered him for a few moments longer before nodding, ceding to his expertise.

“I’ll take your lead, then.”

* * *

“You know, I think I like this,” Jaskier said, looking up at his witcher, who looked rather annoyed with the suit he had to wear. The gala was in full swing, drinks being poured rather liberally, now that donations had started coming in for the museum.

“You like being in a crowded room of sycophants and schmoozers?” Geralt grumbled, keeping his fact at least neutral, if slightly disapproving.

“No, I like getting dressed up and alone with you.”

“We’re not—”

“Without our nosy coworkers.”

“Ah,” Geralt nodded, agreeing with that, at least. He looked out at the dancing couples on the floor, followed Jaskier’s eyes to them, and cleared his throat. “Uh, would you like to—?”

“I’d love to.”

They had about an hour before the big speech, so they had to keep appearances before they disappeared with the artifact. Geralt led Jaskier out on the floor, awkwardly taking his hand and waist, swaying side to side before Jaskier huffed out a laugh.

“Let me lead?” Jaskier suggested.

“Please.”

“Just follow my steps. No, you don’t have to look, just look at my face.” Jaskier took the lead, pulling and pushing Geralt’s body this way and that for several songs, gently teaching him to dance. “Is this the first time you’ve danced in four hundred years?”

Geralt gave him a small pout. “No,” he objected, far too forcefully for him to be telling the truth. Jaskier just bit back a grin and continued.

“I like this, too. You taught me to hold my own in a knife fight, and I’m helping you blend in with sycophants and schmoozers.”

“Thanks bunches,” Geralt drawled sarcastically. They relaxed into the dance, getting a few drinks, which Geralt drank most of, due to his higher metabolism.

They almost forgot they were there on a mission, but when the head curator took his place at the top of a set of stairs, Geralt hummed and pushed Jaskier to the side by the small of his back. Once they were free of the crowds, and wandering the collections alone, Geralt shook the tail they had with a quick wave of his hand. Jaskier was very impressed.

“You didn’t even need to bribe him!” Jaskier exclaimed in a whisper.

“Nope.” Geralt led him along, to the hall with the blanket. “Alright, how’re we getting this?”

Jaskier was already pulling on a set of gloves from his pocket, and what looked like an adorable, miniature crowbar.

“Museums have laughably weak hinges on display cases for items they don’t consider to be important. If we were breaking into something like that dangerously tempting diamond case over there, I might need a bit more delicacy.” With a grunt and a shove, Jaskier popped the hinge right out of the wooden backing. He caught it deftly in his hand, and passed it to Geralt. “Hang onto that for a bit.”

He did the same with the lower hinge and pried the back open the few inches he could. “Come to Jaskier, come on.” He reached in and delicately lifted the blanket off of the display, taking care not to disturb anything else. “You have the decoy?” Jaskier asked, dropping the artifact on the floor and away from them.

“Here,” Geralt said, pulling the decoy blanket out from behind him. Where the other one had felt cold all the way through Jaskier’s gloves, this one was still warm from Geralt’s body heat.

“There we go.” Jaskier adjusted it as much as he could, setting the little placard over the top like it had been before. He reattached the busted hinges to the backing with little more than a press of his thumbs over each side, and rubbed his hands together. They looked down at the blanket. “Looks kinda pathetic, really.”

“That pathetic blanket killed three people,” Geralt reminded him, tucking it into the anti-mesmeric field bag. “Shit. Should’ve brought a bigger bag.”

“She’s a bulky thing, isn’t she?” Jaskier asked, teeth chattering with excitement. It must have been nerves. He hadn’t done anything like this in so long, it was a thrill to be back in the saddle again. “Alright, let’s go.”

They hid the blanket under Jaskier’s torso, passing it off as a baby bump. Luckily, his collar was high enough to conceal a mating mark, and their cover for the gala was solid.

“Should we stay and dance a bit?” Geralt asked in his ear. Jaskier shivered and turned to look at him.

“I think we could dance back in the hotel,” Jaskier suggested, the intention clear behind his fluttering eyelashes, the scent of desire radiating off of him.

Geralt’s eyes darkened, and he pressed him through the crowd once more, alpha intent clear in his movements. There’d be gossip about them, of course, but only the salacious kind.

The minute they were outside, Jaskier sighed. It was a little warmer out here than inside the museum. It was a short walk to the inn, but it felt so much longer than he remembered before. The thrill of the successful job was wearing off to a bone-deep exhaustion, and Jaskier noticed his eyes blinking drowsily as they climbed the stairs to their room. Geralt asked Jaskier for the key.

“The what?” he asked, slurring his words a little.

“You didn’t have that much to drink,” Geralt frowned.

“I didn’t?” Jaskier swayed on the spot, fumbling in his pocket for the key to their room.

“No, you didn’t…” Geralt took the key from him and pulled him inside.

“G’r’lt? Wha’s happening?” Jaskier’s limbs felt heavy and light all at once. He needed...he needed to get his clothes off. They were going to have sex. That’s right. He giggled a little as he felt himself being lowered to the bed, and his suit being unbuttoned. “Oh...we’re doing  _ that…” _ he laughed, squirming. “C’mere, m’cold without you…”

“Jaskier!” Geralt snapped his fingers, getting his attention. He pulled the blanket away, and noticed a dark red spot on Jaskier’s stomach, perfectly matching the triangle of material from the blanket that he couldn’t fit into the AMFB. “Fuck!” he swore, tossing the bag out to the side. “Fuck.”

Jaskier whined, not wanting to see his alpha angry or upset. He felt so cold.

Frantically, Geralt called Vesemir on the Farnsworth. “Jaskier got hit by the blanket,” he said bluntly. “He’s going into a hypothermic shock from the cold.”

Jaskier hardly understood the proceedings, starting to cry. He’d never been so cold and alone in his life...all his friends and loved ones, dead to the waves, floating like blocks of ice, bumping against the rowboat.

It was all a blur until a portal opened and Triss stepped through, Eskel behind her. Geralt assisted Triss in emergency medicine while Eskel handled the artifact, but Jaskier didn’t know what was happening. His eyes only saw the darkness, only heard the sinking of the ship, only felt that numbing cold seeping in.

“Fuck!” Triss shouted, pulling her hands back. “We need to induce a-a-a fever or—” she cut herself off and gave a frown down at Jaskier.

“Or what?” Geralt asked, ready to bring her the world if it meant Jaskier would be alright.

“A heat.”

* * *

The blur changed after that. He was back in his room, and there was lots of shouting, lots of apologizing, and then—

All at once, he gasped and writhed on the bed, his senses going into overdrive. Jumping from mind-breaking cold to the haze of heat had his vision unfocused and shaky. He whined and clawed at the sheets. Two pairs of hands held him down, dabbing away the sweat on his brow with a wet cloth.

_ It’s only for one day, Jaskier, it’ll be alright. _

Yennefer’s voice rang through everywhere and nowhere at once. It was like she was speaking directly to his mind. 

He gave another pitiful whine. He’d never felt like this in a heat before. He wanted… He wanted…

“Geralt…” he begged. “Geralt…”

“Geralt is alright, the alphas all left the B&B, it’s just us,” Yennefer spoke aloud, on his left, keeping him on the bed.

Jaskier cried out and wept, needing his alpha desperately. The pain and aching lasted for hours and hours before he was given what he wanted.

Geralt’s scent hit him before Jaskier saw him, and he felt his touch a second before he recognized him. All he could fathom was  _ alpha, alpha is here. _ He sobbed in relief, holding him close and curling up into a ball.

Later, he’d know that it was an omega who died in the blanket, and that all three of the employees who’d died from it had been omegas, and that the other dynamics weren’t susceptible to the artifact’s power. He’d take that information in with a straight face, but he’d stare himself in the face and curse himself the moment he was alone with a mirror.

Geralt was hard against his thigh as he curled up with Jaskier on the bed. Yen and Triss had gotten him through the worst of it, and he was on the downhill of it, but he was still experiencing his usual four days’ of heat in twenty-four hours, and it was a lot to put one person through. Geralt did everything to take Jaskier’s mind off the pain, he scented him, he stroked his hair, he kissed him and even sang to him, some song about coins and elves that didn’t seem to fucking end.

Through it all, Jaskier begged, he pleaded with Geralt to make the pain end, to just fuck him through it, to make him forget it, even to put him out of his misery at times. Geralt hid his anguish well enough, but the second Jaskier’s fever broke and he passed out from exhaustion, Geralt wept.

* * *

The next few days were tense. Jaskier was on forced bedrest, recovering from everything that had happened. His deepest moments of rest were interrupted with the echoes of the things he’d asked Geralt to do. Gods, would he ever talk to Jaskier again? Would he be able to help him through a heat for real, with that memory tainting everything around him?

Jaskier didn’t even hear Geralt moving around in his room, or in the bathroom. He knew the witcher could move silently when he wanted to, but Jaskier had grown accustomed to knowing where Geralt was just by feeling his presence.

And Geralt didn’t go anywhere near him for four days.

Triss brought him food while he recovered, and helped him on shaky legs as he went to the washroom and back. Jaskier didn’t ask after Geralt, fearing the answer. The worst-case scenarios all played through his head like a manic film reel.

_ Geralt’s decided to live at the warehouse, like Vesemir now. _

_ Geralt is on...an extended trip.  _ (He won’t be back til Jaskier’s in the grave)

_ Geralt said thank you but no thank you, sorry. _

_ Geralt said he hates you. Why couldn’t you just be uncomplicated? There’s so much in his life that’s complicated. You were on track to being the one good thing he kept in his life. _

Day in and day out, the monologue never ceased. His rests were fitful with worry, and he often woke up in silent tears, the same dream ending the same way: calling out to the witcher, but only seeing his back shring smaller and smaller til it disappeared on the horizon.

On the fifth morning of his recovery, he woke to find that someone else was in his room. It wasn’t Geralt, like his leaping heart had hoped for, but Vesemir.

He looked...terrible. He had dark circles under his eyes, and looked about three hundred years older. Jaskier sat up, shaky but a lot better than he’d been a few days ago. Vesemir’s eyes glowed like a cat’s when he looked over to Jaskier.

They looked at one another in silence. It was tense, and full of worry, though both were borne from different places. Vesemir, surprisingly, spoke first.

“You mean a lot to us, Jaskier.” It was one of the only times he could remember Vesemir using his name. There was no underlying catch to the statement, just truth, in its whole form.

“I…” Jaskier coughed, throat dry. He sipped at some water on his side table. “You all mean a lot to me, too. All of you.”

Vesemir swallowed roughly. “We had to put you into heat. You were freezing to death while we watched. I’m sorry.”

Jaskier’s heart pounded. Never in his life had he thought Vesemir would sit here and apologize to him, and actually be remorseful about it. “If it saved my life, I...I’ll get over it.”

Vesemir looked up at him. “You were...it was torturing you.”

_ Please, Geralt, please, just end it, end it please, it hurts so much, please, alpha… _

Jaskier felt tears well in his eyes. “It was.” He looked away from those sad topaz eyes. “I was scared. I didn’t know what was happening. I know I...I said a lot of—” he choked on the lump in his throat.

“Don’t feel ashamed. I’ve seen stronger men crack under less pain than you went through.”

Jaskier barked a hollow laugh, wiping at his eyes. “Damned by faint praise,” he observed. Confidence returned like the first bird north after winter. “Is Geralt...is he alright?”

“Shaken, but...I told him to go hunt it off. He didn’t think he would have to see you go through anything remotely like that. He’s very weak for omegas in distress, as you probably know.” Vesemir huffed a little and stood, not quite pacing, but eager for something to do with his hands.

“I do,” Jaskier said with a watery smile. “I...I’ve been worrying for days. Whether he—” he swallowed around his pride. “Whether he thought differently of me. Less of me, for—”

“Stop.” Vesemir had anger, thick and heavy, written in every line of his body. “You were injured, quite terribly, out in the field. Artifacts are unpredictable and chaotic by definition. It was not your fault for getting hurt, nor was it Geralt’s fault for not noticing it sooner. You endured hours of torture from your own body, and you survived. Do you think we haven’t all said things we didn’t mean? Didn’t regret as soon as we knew we said them? You will have time to apologize for the things you’ve said, as Geralt will, but if there’s one thing I won’t tolerate, it’s adding more insult to injury, when you’re the only one still handing out punishments.”

He was breathing hard by the end of his speech, hands clenching and unclenching in an irrhythm. Jaskier swallowed again.

“Alright,” he said, nodding his understanding. Vesemir came over, and in the final act of surprise Jaskier had gone through, ruffled his hair before leaving out the door.

“I’ll let Geralt know you’re awake.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LITERALLY ME VS THE TWO DAYS LEFT OF NANO LMAO


	9. Interlude: Minnie

Geralt stood tentatively in the doorway when he came up. Jaskier stayed sitting in his bed, not trusting his legs to hold him up at all. He looked up at the alpha, wringing the sheet between his hands like it’d provide the right words for this moment. Geralt took another shy step in, but didn’t move to sit on the bed with him. The room still smelled halfway between a whorehouse and an infirmary, and it was probably as painful for Geralt’s senses as much as it was for Jaskier’s heart.

Jaskier blinked shyly up at him before looking down at his hands. “Vesemir basically implied that he’d skin me alive if I tried to apologize, but the only words I can seem to say are all apologies.”

Geralt stayed silent for a few moments longer before sighing. He grabbed the armchair by the bookshelf and pulled it closer to the bed. “He said the same to me. Why don’t we secretly apologize and never tell a soul?”

That wicked gleam in his eyes brought tears to Jaskier’s, and the hopeful smile, the glimmer of reconciliation, is what made him nod. “I’m sorry for the things I said. I didn’t mean to distress you, and I never intended to put you in a situation to have to see me like that.”

“I’m sorry for letting you get hurt, and for not noticing it sooner. And avoiding you, after. Half of that was me thinking I didn’t deserve you, and the other half was Vesemir telling me to take a hike.”

The pair looked at each other in a new light. Things wouldn’t go back to normal, not in a way that they’d dream of, but things would be...well, they’d be okay.

To emphasize that their brand of normal was strictly different, Jaskier then blurted out, “I love you.”

Geralt looked as surprised as Jaskier. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh fuck, I said that, huh?”

“Yeah, kind of loudly.” Geralt’s grin grew slowly, but it took over his whole face like the sun breaking over the horizon. He came up closer. “Can I ask you to keep another secret?”

Jaskier was still slowly sinking into the vast underground kingdom of mortification. “Yes,” he mumbled from behind his hands. Geralt gently pulled them down off his face.

“I love you, too.” Geralt placed a soft kiss to the middle of Jaskier’s palm. “I love you,” he said to the inside of his wrist. “I love you,” he said to the steam-burn scar on his forearm. “I love you,” he said to the thin skin of his inner elbow. “I love you.” This last declaration, he said to Jaskier, face-to-face.

“Come here,” Jaskier whispered hoarsely, tears falling down his cheeks like a summer rain. Geralt curled back up in the bed with him and held him close.

“I missed your scent,” Geralt admitted, fully settled in his sappy love confessions. “But you stink right now.”

Jaskier gave a thoroughly surprised laugh, and grinned at the alpha. “Well, my knees have been a bit weak for a few days. Might need help standing if I took a shower.”

“How about a bath, then?”

* * *

Geralt of Rivia was sort of the expert on baths at the B&B. He was sort of the expert on baths, everywhere. When he’d been a witcher in the traditional sense, he’d sprung for baths as often as he could, but hygiene on the Continent in the 13th century was deplorable compared to how it currently was.

As he poured a bucket of warm, sudsy water, softened with oils and salts, over Jaskier’s body, he spoke in a low voice to keep the mood calm and relaxed. “Did you know there was once a witcher keep with permanent baths aided by springs that ran underneath the castle?”

“I don’t know a lot about witchers,” Jaskier admitted. “But hot springs sound very nice.”

“They weren’t hot. They were cold, cold as the mountain the water came from.”

“Oh,” Jaskier frowned. That didn’t sound pleasant at all.

“But sometimes, when the whole keep would come together in the off-season, they could get the water almost warm enough that your balls didn’t shrink up into your guts.”

Jaskier laughed. “How’d they manage that?”

Geralt held up his hand in a peculiar shape before Jaskier’s eyes. Then, right before him, his hand started to glow, and flames engulfed it from the wrist-up. He gasped in delight. “And that doesn’t hurt?”

“Witcher Signs rarely backfire on the caster. This one is called Igni.” He brought his hand down to the water’s surface, and let the glow dissipate through the bathwater. It warmed right up, all around Jaskier.

“Oh, wow.” Jaskier marveled, his mind whirring with possibilities. “Are all of you magic?”

“Some more powerful than others, like mages. But I was born human, I was only made to be this way. I’ve also had this knowledge for a very long time. Few centuries ago, I could only blast a wall of fire out against a target.”

“Yeah, ‘only blast,’” Jaskier scoffed. “Some of us can’t even do that.”

“We all have our strengths, and everyone has their blind spots. It’s why we work in teams now. Witchers used to not even survive their first year out on the Path alone.”

“That sounds...horrible.” Jaskier grimaced.

“It was. It took a long time for me to even get close to Lambert and Eskel. They didn’t even make their mating bond until we started working on artifact recovery.”

That long? “That’s...commitment.”

“Now that I’m older—”

“Or just old.”

“Hush.” Geralt dumped a bucket of water on his head. “As I was saying. Now that I’m older, I think it’s better to offer companionship openly. You don’t know how long you’ll have it.”

The pair grew quiet, lost in thought at the wisdom. Jaskier leaned over after a while and planted a wet kiss on Geralt’s cheek. “I think I’ll have to try that, too.”

* * *

The warehouse was understandably  _ distraught _ at Jaskier’s injury. From the moment he stepped into the office, once he was cleared for at least administrative work, Jaskier was wrapped in the pungent scent of garlic and cheese. While it did some very nice things for his nose, Vesemir looked to be quite ill.

“What’s going on?” Jaskier asked.

“Warehouse’s worried,” Vesemir said in a funny voice, obviously trying not to breathe through his nose. “Go walk around a bit, say hi to your dog, and can you ask the warehouse to quit worrying? I’m going to hurl.”

“Missed you too, Vesemir.” Jaskier carefully made his way down the stairs and to the workshop, where the door was wide open and welcoming. Jaskier took a seat on the floor, still wrapped in garlic and cheese. “I’m alright, I promise. They took good care of me in time, old girl.”

He gave an awkward pat to the concrete floor, which warmed at his touch.  _ Okay. _ “There’s one little mark on me, but other than that, I’m spic and span.” There was a resounding  _ creak _ of the shelves around him, which probably meant that the warehouse was rather dubious of his condition.

The longer he stayed down on the floor, though, the fainter the strange savory smell grew. He walked over to the stables, a little curious to see how Greg had been getting on, as well as to meet Roach again.

Geralt had mentioned the horse once or twice, and by that, the author means, were she to include all of the long monologues reminiscing about his days with the mare on the Path, this story would have gone off the rails and into the ocean in the second chapter.

The chestnut mare was munching on a bit of grass growing inexplicably in the middle of the warehouse floor. “Hello,” Jaskier said in greeting. The horse lifted her head curiously and abandoned her snack, clopping a bit closer. “My name is Jaskier. It’s lovely to meet you, Lady Roach.”

Roach huffed.  _ Lady? Her? _

“I know we were rather rude, forcing a new stablemate on you like this without proper notice, but I wanted to thank you for being so kind and accommodating. I brought you something.” Jaskier pulled a shiny red apple out of his bag, and held it out to her, on his flat palm. Roach sniffed at it for a moment before munching happily away at it.

Roach decided she liked him.

Greg was, predictably, still asleep in his stall, having collapsed into a strange heap of hooves and arms on the ground. Jaskier frowned at him for awhile before an idea popped in his head. It might have to wait until the end of his hibernation, but…

He scribbled the idea in his notebook for later.

* * *

For later became ‘for right now’ when Vesemir informed him of his grounded from fieldwork status the next day. He was still recovering both from the injury and something known as “post-heat brain,” so he wasn’t particularly at his best walking around.

“Come on, I haven’t fainted in days.”

“You fainted yesterday evening.”

“I was sitting down.”

“You’ll continue to be sitting down until you’re cleared by the warehouse doctor.”

“We have a doctor?”

Jaskier had been wary of doctors for most of his life. The quality in his care had changed drastically from when he was an unpresented child and when he was a newly-presented omega. He took great offense to this, and had only ever sought medical attention when he really, really needed it.

(He was very good at convincing himself he could cure his own chickenpox. His neighbors thought otherwise. He was still bitter about it.)

Vesemir put out a call to the warehouse doctor that afternoon, and looked very...fidgety about it. Jaskier spent the morning of the doctor’s arrival deliberately procrastinating in the office, eager to see what had Vesemir so tightly wound. His Farnsworth beeped, and he answered it in less than a second, smoothing his hair back and  _ preening. _

“Yes?” Vesemir asked, forcibly casual.

“Doctor Minnie’s here, should I send her through the portal or did you want to come down here?” Triss asked, a sly smile on her face.

“Don’t come up, we’ll go down there. Goodbye.” Vesemir closed his transmitter, almost breathless. Jaskier barely hid his grin.  _ Vesemir never says goodbye, he just hangs up. _ “Well? Let’s go, kid.”

The pair walked through the portal back to the B&B, where literally all of the witchers had gathered in the parlor, speaking with a new arrival.

She was an older woman, but her age held an air of wisdom and authority Jaskier normally never saw in betas. Her eyes, a sharp brown, held laughter in the wrinkles around them, and most likely never missed a thing. She dressed in grays and browns, though Jaskier suspected she dressed more colorfully when she wasn’t at work. The most interesting thing was that Jaskier recognized her.

“Countess Mignole?” Jaskier said with a laugh.

“Doctor, now, but yes. It’s nice to see you again, Jaskier.” She smiled warmly at him.

“Oh, you’ve met?” Triss said, setting down a tray of tea.

“I was one of her students at the Academy, she helped me buy my workshop.” Jaskier shook her hand. Vesemir looked like he wanted to hide anywhere but here. Did he have some kind of bad history with Mignole?

“How fortuitous that you should be working here. I heard you were in a bit of an accident in the field.”

“Clear out, you lot. She’ll get to you later,” Vesemir grunted at the others in the room, leaving the two of them alone. Jaskier just  _ had _ to know what was going on there. They sat.

“It was an accident, yes. An artifact gave me acute hypothermia, transferred through touch. Triss had to go to drastic measures to save my life.”

“She mentioned inducing an accelerated heat to bring your core temperature back up,” Mignole nodded. Jaskier shifted uncomfortably, crossing his legs. “Tell me what happened.”

“It was like my usual heats were condensed into one excruciating day.” He could meet her eyes as he spoke. “I said some things I would have never said otherwise. It was…”

“Traumatic.”

Jaskier looked at her quickly, ready to deny her.

“It was, Jaskier,” she insisted. “It was a trauma you went through, and are most likely not seeing the extent of. Triss told me you were bedridden for several days, and haven’t gotten back to full strength.”

Jaskier sighed. “No secrets here, huh?” he muttered. In a more direct voice, he said, “I’ve been able to bounce back from worse. I already made up with Geralt, apologized though they keep telling me I shouldn’t.”

“Have you considered how you’re going to feel at the onset of your next natural heat?”

He hadn’t. Even the mere thought of going into heat again, so soon after this last disastrous one, was enough to send a shiver down his spine. He didn’t know if he would be able to ask Geralt for his help, or even ask him to be intimate before then. He was shaken from his thoughts by Mignole saying his name.

“Jaskier. We can do some tests to see if the induced heat has changed your regular cycle, and find out when the next one will be, if that will alleviate your worries at all.”

“Yes.” His voice sounded very small. “I’d like to um, well. I’d like to be prepared.”

“Working backwards to build a timeline would be helpful,” she said as she went through a large bag at her side. She pulled out a strange looking pair of spectacles, with green-tinted lenses which she exchanged for more orangey-colored ones. “Hold out your hand,” she said, putting the glasses on.

Jaskier went through several tests there in the parlor, feeling calmer than he thought he’d be at his first doctor’s visit in almost a decade. “I hope you don’t mind that I lit a candle. I’ve found it to be quite soothing.”

“That must be why I’m not so fidgety.” Jaskier gave a short laugh.

“Have you been fidgety lately? Nervous, afraid, worried though you’re safe?”

Jaskier chewed his lip in thought. He didn’t want to say yes. He didn’t want to say that although he’d spent several nights in Geralt’s arms, he always felt like he had to watch his own back, like at any minute, if he was to let his guard down at all, the cold, the ice would be back, and it’d rip him from his happiness once more.

“Somewhat,” he said. Mignole gave him a knowing look that said  _ I see right through your bullshit, _ and started writing on a padded notebook.

“Then I recommend, until you’re at least a little more honest with how you feel, that you somewhat use this tincture on your pulse points when you feel most...fidgety.” Jaskier looked down, scolded, and nodded. He took the prescription. “Any apothecary will do, but I think Triss might be able to whip something together in a pinch. Now, I think I promised to look at Lambert’s elbow…”

“If I were…” Jaskier trailed off, but his confidence surged with her returned attention. “If I were to...figure out what exactly my body was doing, how would I talk to you?”

Mignole gave him a smile, and her card. “You can call me anytime.”

* * *

Jaskier watched the witchers fall over themselves trying to make Mignole laugh and smile. It was very clear that she was very dear to them all, but none so much as Vesemir. Vesemir watched her with a fond look in his eyes, but held himself off from doing or saying anything he would regret later. Jaskier thought back to some of the things Geralt said in the bath, and waited until they were alone in the office to speak.

“So…” Jaskier began,e ever eloquent and subtle.

“Questions will be submitted in triplicate to the round filing cabinet,” Vesemir said, pointing to the large wastepaper bin in the corner.

“Funny.” Jaskier stood, and came a bit closer. “So were you two involved in the past, or…?” Vesemir gave a low growl. “You don’t scare me. Tell me.”

“Mignole and I… We knew each other when I was a young witcher on the Path. I was foolish, and I fell over my own feet when I saw her.” He sounded wistful. “Few hundred years back, I—”

“Oh for fucks sake, is anyone here  _ not _ immortal?” Jaskier bemoaned.

“Do you want a story or not?” Vesemir snapped.

“Sorry. Just pondering my own mortality, rare as it is.”

“Anyway. A few hundred years ago, we were just kids, and she was a countess, I was just a witcher. Would’ve never worked out. The end.”

“No. Not the end. You’re both much older and past that part of your very long lives, you’re like different people now. Why haven’t you tried rekindling the old flame?”

“It’s alright when I call myself old, you’re on thin ice.” Vesemir grumbled, trying not to engage in the conversation.

“I’m still waiting for a why…” Jaskier sing-songed.

“Maybe I should send you back out in the field just to get you to shut up.” Vesemir sighed. “When we—” he stopped. Started again. “When I...found out about her immortal side, I thought that meant we were supposed to be together. But...I never spoke with her about it. With everything that happened with the battle, and warehousing, it wasn’t even me who hired her on as the warehouse doctor.”

“You didn’t?”

“That was all Yen. She put a call out to the remaining immortals in the world, and she was one of the first that responded to help us out. After awhile, I sat down at the desk, and never stood up again. What drew her to me was adventure and mystery, and now I’m...paperwork and history.”

Jaskier watched him, saw the tension and exhaustion in the lines of his shoulders. He put a hand between his shoulders, unmoving and resolute.  _ I’m here, _ the hand said.  _ I’ve got you. _

“Well, maybe start small. Do something friends would do together,” Jaskier suggested.

“Like what?” Vesemir said doubtfully.

“I don’t know, short walks in the woods, take her out in the auto I know you’re hiding at the B&B.”

“Speak of that vehicle outside this office and they’ll never find your body.”

“Lips are sealed.” He walked over to the stairs down to the floor. “Honestly, Vesemir, just dinner would be nice. Make sure to plan ahead, so you old rascals can keep your bedtimes. Wouldn’t want to wear you out too much too soon~!”

He ducked to miss the flying book that almost nailed him right in the head, and laughed the whole way to the workshop.


	10. #X-XXXX Various Unshelved Artifacts

Jaskier cursed as he pulled his hand away from the damned grandfather clock in the office. Why Vesemir was determined to use something so analog as  _ wound-wire springs _ instead of steam, he didn’t know, but he was pretty sure this clock was an artifact because it was just as crotchety as the old witcher. To be completely fair, Jaskier didn’t have a particularly good experience with timepieces in the warehouse, if you’ll remember.

“This is some bullshit.” Jaskier resisted the urge to kick the old thing, and turned to his toolbag again. When he looked back, the gears he’d just managed to pry off of the clock face were back on, as if pulled by electromagnets. “What!” he shouted.

“Will you keep it down?” Vesemir snapped, not looking up from his book. He looked about ready to slip into a nap, though Jaskier’s (entirely superior) wrist chronometer informed him that it was a little past ten in the morning.

“This thing belongs in a furnace, and burned to a crisp, as soon as humanly possible,” Jaskier declared. The pendulum on the grandfather clock let Jaskier’s crotch know what it thought about that. The artificer lay, wounded and rolling, on the floor of the office. “Oh gods, I’m dying, tell Geralt I loved him dearly, I’m going to die because a clock smashed my dick up into my skull.”

“Quit being dramatic. Today’s a holiday, anyway. Let’s go back down. Maybe Triss will make you some tea.”

Jaskier limped through the portal and graciously accepted the bag of ice from the sorceress upon entering the B&B again. Her clairvoyance was a gift to them all. He collapsed onto the parlor couch, gingerly icing his balls with the little baggie. Geralt came and fussed over him for a while, and settled on chiding Vesemir for letting him work on the clock.

“I told him it was an office artifact. He kept muttering about steam-tickers and automatic synchronicity with Novigrad Standard Time, and got himself knocked in the—”

“Please don’t recollect it. The memory makes the pain worse,” Jaskier moaned, pouting.

“Why’s Jaskier sound like a dying cat?” Lambert asked as he walked into the room, flopping on the other side of the artificer.

“Office clock.”

“Oooooh,” Lambert hissed. “I’m so sorry.” Jaskier flipped him the bird without looking, and the last two housemates wandered in. Eskel lit a fire in the hearth, and Triss set down snacks on the coffee table. They looked incredibly tasty, and well-decorated.

“Did you say today’s a holiday?” Jaskier asked Vesemir, halfway crawled into Geralt’s lap.

“It is. The Day of the Firsts.”

“It’s ‘feasts,’ old man,” Lambert laughed.

“It’s not, it’s the Day of the Firsts. I’ll remind you that I was there for the  _ first _ Day of the Firsts, where the first kings of the Continent came together.”

“What’d they do?” Jaskier asked, already caught up in the story.

“Fuck-all,” the whole room answered. Lambert gave him a grin.

“And as such, we do fuck-all on this bright and joyful Tuesday, because some old farts eight thousand years ago came together and divided up land they’d fight over for the next eighty centuries.”

“It was  _ not _ eight thousand years ago,” Eskel scoffed, pulling his own mate into his lap to give Triss the armchair closer to the fire.

“What else happens on Fuck-All Tuesday—I’m sorry, Day of the Firsts?” Jaskier asks. Geralt snuggled him close, arms wound tightly around his middle. Jaskier got a kiss to the side of his neck in return.

“Typically we get blindingly drunk and talk about the past with the people who lived it with us,” Eskel said, not sounding particularly enthused about the tradition.

“Jaskier’s never heard the old stories,” Geralt pointed out. The room shifted their eyes over to the artificer, eyes wild with excitement.

“Well, artificer, what stories would you like to hear today?” Lambert asked, getting up to retrieve alcohol for the group, snatching a hand pie on his way out.

“I want to hear about your first artifacts. Before you even knew what artifacts were.”

The room seemed to all sigh at the same time, racking their brains back to a time before the warehouse, before protocol, likely before they’d even stopped walking the Path together.

“I’ll go first,” Triss said. The eyes shifted to her, and she laid out the pleats on her skirt a little neater before settling in. “In the days where I was a court mage for King Foltest of Temeria, I didn’t see much, but after Foltest’s death, I decided to go out and see the world for a bit…

* * *

_ Several hundred years ago, somewhere in Temeria… _

Triss Merigold was never an adventurous mage. She did her job, she tried to help those in need, and she preferred the comfort of a good book and a warm armchair over the cold dirt roads of the Continent. One of the Oracles at Aretuza had been warning of a cold snap, and she wanted to get somewhere warm before it set in over Temeria. So she was headed south. She’d heard Toussaint was often graced by good weather, and had been wanting to travel there for years after a wine merchant had stopped in Vizima.

She traveled alone, not even with a horse to carry her things, thinking that if she just put her mind to it, the wilderness wouldn’t bother her comfy court soul as much.

She was wrong, of course.

Camping was an absolute nightmare, because she was stubborn and had insisted she wouldn’t be using any magic while getting to Toussaint. That rule lasted for all of two hours, until she had to raise a tent and take shelter from the rain.

Of course, the tent she’d purchased hadn’t been enchanted to repel water, and all of her belongings were soaked through by morning, not to mention Triss’ hair was in absolute disarray as the sun dried her off.

Using a bit of a glamour, she walked until she found a fairly populous town, just waking up on their usual day of rest. She asked around until she could find a tailor, but something must have been lost in translation, because when she came across the shop, it turned out she’d been redirected to a consignment store.

It was perhaps Triss’ exceptionally good luck that had her running into Lambert, witcher of the Wolf School, just before entering the shop. They shared a quick chat over things, made a few less-than-tasteful jokes at the late King Foltest’s expense, and entered into a verbal agreement to travel together. Safety, in fact, lays in numbers, as they both knew.

The shop had been old, sporting men’s and women’s clothing from several decades prior. Triss was drawn toward the more romantic long-sleeved gowns in the back, while Lambert browsed the discount section. Triss had offered to pay, of course, being on a court salary, but Lambert had been proud and honestly rather fond of the sorceress, and didn’t want to owe her a debt he couldn’t readily repay.

* * *

“That is  _ not _ what happened, Marigold, and you know it!”

“Hush, you’ll tell your story later.”

* * *

Triss bought a few dresses and several warmer petticoats, knowing what she did about the upcoming snap. She purchased Lambert a warmer coat, one that had more fabric than holes, which his present attire certainly resembled.

Yes it was, Lambert, stop interrupting.

It looked like cheesecloth.

Regardless, they took their purchases to the inn room Lambert had been renting out, and rested from their day, drinking and eating and catching up. Lambert had last seen Triss several years prior, after all. Things were, for all appearances, normal.

The next day, however, the two travelers rose before the sun broke over the horizon, and readied themselves for the walk to the next waypoint between there and Toussaint. Lambert had a map, yes, he was a very good, very smart witcher, and had a map, and led them down what he called the fastest route. It was fine.

The minute the sun hit the pair was when they knew something was very, very wrong. Triss’ mood, still a bit dampened by the rain the day before, was instantly lighter, for lack of a better term. She seemed to take longer strides, and didn’t feel at all exhausted from the lumpy bed she’d slept on the night before. Lambert had mentioned off-hand that his medallion was doing something funny, but didn’t think anything of it.

That was, until Triss started to levitate off of the road.

Have you ever gotten some really, really good news, and felt like you were walking on clouds? Like there was nothing that could’ve weighed you back down to the earth, because it was so transcendently good? Triss felt like that.

It was like she was walking on some invisible hill, getting higher and higher above the ground next to Lambert. Lambert frowned and told her to knock it off, that she’d attract too much attention pulling magic stunts like that.

“But it’s not a stunt,” Triss had said. “I’m not using magic.” She stopped walking, but didn’t stop rising.

Lambert reacted on instinct, reaching out and grabbing her ankle, which wasn’t a moral offense back in this time, Jaskier, calm down. The combined weight of Lambert and Triss managed to keep them both on the ground, but Triss felt something tugging her infinitely upward, wanting to rise with the sun’s journey across the sky. The witcher thought quickly, looking around and seeking out a cave a half-mile away from the road. Deep in the cave, where the sun had never shone, Triss floated back down to the earth, as gently as a flake of falling snow.

“I think it’s the dress,” Lambert said, with a funny note to his tone.

“Why would it be the dress?” Triss asked. “This is clearly a curse, why would a dress curse me?”

The witcher asked her to ‘just trust him’ and she did. With no short amount of haste, Triss shedded the garment and tossed it in her bag, exchanging it for a new one, which Lambert tested against the sunlight just to show her it hadn’t been enchanted, or cursed.

What followed was a day’s worth of scientific testing done to the golden garment in question. They kept it sealed tight in Lambert’s daypack, which had much deeper pockets than Triss’ enchanted purse. In the sun, the dress would rise, and at greater rates at high noon than any other time. It took both of them holding the dress down to keep it from flinging up into the sun, which made for some fairly hilarious moments of Lambert flying into the trees before Triss controlled her laughter enough to help.

* * *

“Unfortunately, we burned the dress at dusk because there were some things too strange even for a new witcher and mage to comprehend.” Triss ended her story with a sigh and a smile. Lambert was also smiling, a normally-terrifying look that would incite a healthy dose of caution to whoever was on the receiving end of it.

“Did you ever end up finding out more about it?” Eskel asked, watching Lambert’s smile with an achingly soft look that even sent Jaskier’s heart melting.

“No,” Triss answered. “Back then, it was drink-first, ask questions-never. By the time I thought to look into it again, that old shop had burned down. We never got our answers. That’s the burden, I guess.”

“You never forget your first, after all.” Lambert relaxed and sprawled against Eskel’s lap rather happily, basking in the attention his mate was giving him. “Mine was a little more frustrating, though.”

“Oh?” Geralt asked, shifting Jaskier to a more comfortable position on his thighs.

“Yeah, so you know those boots in Hadley sector…?”

* * *

Lambert hated bandits more than probably any other living thing out on the Path. More than chorts, more than cockatrices, more than annoying sorceresses who couldn’t tell stories right. He never went out of his way to seek them out, but they always seemed to find him.

This one bandit gang liked to run in Kerack, which at least narrowed the search parameters for him, because it seemed like whenever he’d go through Kerack, he’d always get robbed in the middle of the night.

Lambert was a light sleeper, was the thing. He would have heard a bunch of bandits popping up on him in the middle of the night, would have heard them from a mile away. The bandits in Kerack, however, they seemed to pop in and out of existence without anyone ever noticing.

So the witcher did what he knew how to do best: he set a trap. In the middle of the woods, using a campsite he’d used some thirty years prior, he let the fire burn down far too long for any respectable witcher, pulled a hood over his head, crossed his arms over his chest, and waited.

He didn’t have to wait long. Bandits were greedy, and greed made you rush, made you sloppy. With a  _ whoosh _ of air, a man seemingly jumped into existence. The second he walked in, Lambert watched him. He was very strange, though. The second he arrived, he stepped carefully out of his boots, just dirty socks on a dirty forest floor. Lambert stayed still for as long as was necessary before bursting into action, diving to take down the thief as he went through Lambert’s belongings.

He shouted and grunted as the bandit shrugged back into the boots after kicking a handful of dirt into his eyes, and by sheer luck, lambert managed to grab onto the man’s pants.

And then he took a step in the boots.

The world around them whizzed by, stealing Lambert’s breath as they went. He almost let go in shock, but sheer instinct kept his hands firmly in the man’s beltloops. Lambert managed a quick “fuck you!” before regaining his senses. They were in a completely different environment, now, still dark, but clearly out of the forest and in the middle of a lake-dotted field. Lambert got the guy on his back and knocked him out cold, taking the boots off his feet, and finally looking around.

Clearly, it was the boots’ fault. Before he knew any better, he threw them up in the air and blasted them with a fireball of Igni, and they exploded in a shower of purple and red sparks.

That was, of course, until they landed right next to them, looking a little singed but no worse for wear.

He made the decision to keep them, if not for himself, but to make sure no one else in the world had them, and used them to steal from others.

* * *

“So what were they?” Jaskier asked. “What actually happened?” He munched on another handpie from the platter.

“They’re Twenty-League Boots,” Lambert said. Jaskier frowned.

“You mean like in the game?”

“The what?!” half the room asked.

“There’s a game. Oh, you don’t know? For real?”

Geralt shook his head. “I don’t think many of us have had time for games the last few hundred years.”

“There’s a—well, some of the better places have boards, but it’s a board game, I suppose. You’re serious, you’ve never heard of Brigs and Brigands?”

“We’ll talk about them later. I want to tell my story.” Vesemir settled into his chair a little more and waved off Jaskier’s squawks of protest. “I received this box in the post during the offseason for witchers. The others were well clear of Kaer Morhen. No Children of Surprise, no warehouses, no sorceresses, just lots of graves dug a few years prior, and lots and lots of silence…”

* * *

_ Four years after the Siege of Kaer Morhen… _

Vesemir frowned at the box in his hands. The postmaster had fallen back asleep, as he was wont to do, these days. Vesemir remembered when the postmaster had been just a boy hiding behind his uncle’s trousers, and now he was an aging old man in his seventies. And just like he was when Vesemir had first seen him, he had no answers about the mail.

Like most of the witchers, his first encounter with an artifact began with ignoring it. He tossed it in the back of the cart, and helped the old mule up the trail without another worry on his mind. He had only read about a quarter of the library at Kaer Morhen, so he hadn’t gotten bored yet.

However, when the dreams started that summer, he did what every good witcher would do in the face of a wraith. He hunted it down.

The dreams were all the same: he would be turning a corner, minding his own business, when there’d be the same twenty-odd women in the corridor, crossing their arms and glaring at him like he’d done them wrong.

He’d of course felt shame in each of these dreams, but had no idea why.

He took to exhausting himself with work around the castle, to tire himself out so much that he  _ wouldn’t _ dream, but that didn’t help much either. He would walk around the corner, and he’d see the two-dozen angry women, and they’d stare at one another, and then he’d wake up.

Of course, things like this always escalate into bigger and badder moments that none of them can stop. He started noticing vague inklings of anger when he walked around the old keep. He felt eyes on him at every corner, couldn’t even take a shit without feeling like he was being watched. Somehow, he knew it was those same women.

At first he denied it was even happening. He must have seen those women somewhere, in town, maybe. Maybe he’d seen them after he’d failed to save their husbands, that’s why they were so angry.

None of these were the answer.

The women began to manifest themselves, and in his dreams, they would shout. They called him a pervert, a sick maniac, any number of things that Vesemir knew he  _ somehow deserved. _

The thing was, Vesemir was one of the noblest witchers on the Path. Even the Griffin witchers seemed astonished by his manners and proper behavior. There was no way he’d wronged each and every one of these women without knowing about it and regretting it for a lifetime.

In his moments of panic, he found a moment of clarity. What was the one thing he had done differently this summer, just before this had all started?

It was the box.

He found it buried beneath a large sack of flour, and pried it open with a small crowbar. Inside, there were as many garters as there were women that haunted his dreams. They were in perfect condition, and each wrapped in cheesepaper, to keep off any mold or decay from them in their time in the box.

That autumn, Vesemir returned last to the keep. He’d investigated the origins of the box, tracing them back to a curious man in Fen Carn. There, he discovered a vampire who possessed no shortage of items which raised an eyebrow to anyone looking upon them. His name was Emiel Regis Rohellec Terzieff-Godefroy, and—yes, I said vampire—he gave Vesemir these items free of any payment, calling them “too much for his own health”.

What kind of things would drive an eight-hundred-year-old vampire to a lifestyle change, Vesemir didn’t know, but it was certainly suspect. Vesemir had taken Regis’ word for it that the box belonged to a known pervert in Kerack, who stole women’s garters from their very bedrooms, and their spirits had been so incensed with the whole idea that they haunted him for years before he took his own life, throwing himself off one of the cliffs and into the sea.

* * *

“And the box was the first item I inventoried into what would become the warehouse,” Vesemir said proudly. He sat in his pride for all of two seconds before the others started to yell at him.

“What do you mean,  _ vampire?” _

“You met Regis and you didn’t tell me you’d met Regis? No wonder he was so smug about getting bronzed—”

“What happened to the other items you mentioned? What were they? Where did you take them?”

“Why isn’t the box in secure storage?”

“VAMPIRE?”

“I said I’d tell you a story, I didn’t say it’d have a satisfying ending. Telling you anymore would extend beyond the boundaries of what I said I’d tell, which was the  _ first _ artifact I ever came across. I told it, and I’m regretting even entertaining the kid, because you can’t handle being left wanting more.”

“You’re a real piece of work, Vesemir, you know that?” Geralt sighed, sitting back. “Yes, Jaskier, vampires were definitely something one would come across fairly regularly, up until about the sixteenth century, when the Grand Vampiric Inquisition put a cork in that entire culture. Most of the vampires, including Regis, are all currently bronzed in the basement of the warehouse.”

“Alright, architectural anomalies aside,  _ you keep vampires in the warehouse?” _

“They’re all encased in bronze, don’t worry. They’re essentially statues,” Lambert said, taking another drink. “Geralt, you seem in the mood to talk, share your first.”

“Oh.” Geralt shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t...it’s not a funny story.”

“Neither was Vesemir’s.”

“Watch it, pup.”

“Fine. Give me the vodka first.”

* * *

Geralt was used to getting stiffed on his payments. He had been paid in all manner of things that were decidedly  _ not _ currency. Chickens, wine, room and board, a bath, the promise to not kill him for a few hours, it was all he could do to just  _ survive _ the Path and come home in winter.

Sometimes, though, there were payments that were of value, but not to him.

A very haughty alderman who talked enough for the whole town to run out of breath paid him in coin once, but sitting in the pouch was a ring in addition to the seventeen orens he’d been paid for the drowner nest. It was of a strange black metal, but felt iron to the touch. A blood-red stone embedded in the middle, it seemed to reflect the strangest light, casting dark purple shadows in Geralt’s hand when he held it.

The Path was a strange place to be, both everywhere and nowhere at once. He would look up at the stars and think, “this is just the same as back home, at Kaer Morhen. The stars are just as bright there as they are here.”

That’s when things started to get quiet.

A witcher of only 25, Geralt walked the path alone and greeted each day with a vigor only known to witchers that had survived their first years on the path, by the skin of their teeth or otherwise. He went head-long into danger, with no other thought than for his own safety and the glory of a hunt. His brothers, once uncles to the trainees, often shared stories of their hunts on the Path, and Geralt wanted the biggest contract, wanted the most glorious kill of the whole keep to bring home for the winter.

It was why he took the ring.

And it’s why the ring took him.

Geralt had planned to pawn the ring off in the next town, but by the time he’d hiked in, it was dark, and not even the inn was responding to his knocks for admittance. He was a little bewildered, for he’d heard the cries of wild wargs in the distance, but there was no one eager to see a witcher nor seek out his sword against the beasts.

He took care of the wargs, of course, not wanting to let a community suffer just because they’d been strangely rude or shy.

The next town had been the same, though he’d arrived early in the day. There were still plenty of people out in the town square, but it was like all sound seemed to cease when he arrived. The villagers didn’t look at him, but they also didn’t speak in his presence, nor did they seem at all disturbed.

His treatment continued like this for months. He was starving and coin-rich in the few contracts he’d managed to complete without talking to the aldermen beforehand. No one would feed him, nor understand his pleas for food, for water, for lodging, for supplies. He looked at his dragon’s horde of coin and the ring, that blasted dark ring, and he made a decision.

Years later, he’d know it was the ring that had brought him such silence, such ignorant treatment, and he’d welcome stones over silence any day, because there was nothing like being seen and heard and not  _ listened to. _ He dumped all his coin and the ring in the nearest chasm, and felt the music of the world return to him almost instantly.

* * *

The room was quiet except for the crackle of the fire in the hearth. Jaskier had a pained look on his face, too empathetic for his own good, and the other witchers shared a similar mask of hardened sorrow. The Path hadn’t been “kind” to any of them. Eskel showed his scars on his face, Lambert’s scars were on his mind, and Geralt’s, they knew, rested on his heart.

“I’m going to grab the mead. Vesemir, come help me.” Triss walked out of the room before Vesemir could protest from his very comfy chair. Jaskier laid kisses all over Geralt’s face, an omega’s instinct flooding his lips with a tingling fire that only Geralt’s smile could put out.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that, wolf,” Eskel said, meeting Geralt’s eyes. The White Wolf was slowly coming back to himself, dragged from the past by his family, by his friends. “Maybe my story will lift the mood, though…”

* * *

Eskel was never going to say how he got into the stays.

Lambert knew, of course, from the slight telepathy mates shared, but Lambert had also been sworn to secrecy on the matter.  _ How _ Eskel got into the stays was, of course not as important to this story as  _ what _ the stays were made of.

He’d been kipping around Novigrad for a while, for the books. He was coasting off a fair bit of coin he’d won in a brawling tournament, and a few races. Scorpion (rest his soul) was well off in the stables, fed and watered and exercised to his heart’s content while Eskel bummed in the Free City.

There was a strange Saovine raffle happening, which he spent a few coins on tickets for. As luck would have it, he won a trunk full of things that had never been purchased in an estate sale the previous spring.

Within the trunk, there were a few casks of finely-aged brandy, just on the brink of going rancid, just the way Eskel liked them. There was also a great deal of women’s underthings, foundations made in the previous few years that the late owner must have grown out of, or been too dead to wear in the first place.

The combination of the brandy and the underwear should have clued you into exactly how Eskel got into the stays, but he still liked to live in denial, even after five hundred years or so.

The thing about stays and other historical structural undergarments is that they’re actually quite comfortable, despite what insecure men in media have to say. And for fuck’s sake, do they have a lot of things to say despite the truth.

Waking up in stays is a distinctly...different experience. Waking up in stays amongst a mess of feathers and straw that were  _ once _ his inn bed is another matter. Eskel, not wanting to draw too much attention to himself, rounded up his things and dressed, heading to his horse as quickly as possible. He did not remove the stays.

However, the second he saw Scorpion, he felt a sharp pang of hunger which overtook every single braincell he had chugging at that moment. Perhaps he could brave some breakfast before his great escape. More strange things seemed to happen, however. Everyone he walked past seemed to freeze in place. Was there something on his face?

(Besides the scars. He’d mostly gotten used to them by this point.)

It was a strange morning. Scorpion was uncharacteristically skittish on the Path, and Eskel had no idea what was going on, aside from the pleasant hangover and his improved posture.

And then.

He crowed.

He remembered it distinctly, because his throat hurt something fierce afterwards. It had scared him so bradley, though, that he had brought Scorpion into a canter, eager to get away from Novigrad and its strange waters. He found a quiet little clearing to settle down and meditate in, but nothing worked. He was antsy, he was hungry, he wanted to eat Scorpion, he—

He was so hungry he could’ve eaten his own horse.

He felt at his body, and in a blurred moment of sheer panic, used a trophy-taking knife to rend the stays off his body.

When it lay on the forest floor, he stared at it incredulously, breathing hard and half-mad with fear. Was this what had made his mind so strange that morning? Was this what made him tear up an inn mattress and a feather pillow? Was this the thing driving him to consume his own horse, his only companion on the Path?

The answer, of course, was a resounding OF COURSE IT WAS, but Eskel dissected the thing anyway. Instead of the regular whalebone, it seemed that an enterprising young tailor had outfitted the stays with cockatrice bones, which were lighter than baline and a bit more flexible.

Eskel burned it in effigy and never told anyone until after he was mated to Lambert, many centuries later.

* * *

The parlor was crying laughing, listening to a stricken Eskel relay the details of the story. He didn’t seem to notice, too caught up in the story. Even Lambert was wiping away tears, face ruddy and aching from trying to keep his laughter in.

Jaskier shook in Geralt’s arms, collapsed from the unintentional humor of Eskel’s tale.

The group told many more tales, drank many more drinks, and chased away their oldest ghosts by the end of the night.


	11. #S-02-285-333A: Bell, Bastard Motherfucking Trap

“Alright, Greg, let’s try this one more time.”

The not-horse looked petulantly at Jaskier, with all thirteen of his eyes.

“Don’t make that face. It’ll be alright.”

_ “Greg unlike the voice.” _

The communicator was working. The issue was just that the only translator tool they had in the warehouse was wired to use Vesemir’s voice as the output. As such, when Greg wanted to speak, Vesemir’s voicebox spoke for him.

“It’s not too bad!” Jaskier insisted. “Can you just try, for me?”

_ “Greg. Unlike. The voice.” _

Jaskier sighed. “Alright. Do you want me to find another voice?” There was a gentle stamp of a hoof against the paddock floor. “You’re going to have to keep using this one for now, then. It’s not going to get better instantly. I can help, but you really need to just work with me here.”

_ “Greg will avenge for this.” _

“No, you won’t. Isn’t it nice to not have to touch someone’s head to talk?” Jaskier cleaned up his tinkering set, looking around for—ah, there’s his Farnsworth.

_ “Pzzht Greg should avenge for this.” _

“Oates, do me a favor?”

_ “Pzzht what.” _

“Shut the fuck up.”

Jaskier returned to the office and sat at his desk there with a sigh, rubbing the grease off of his hands while he tuned back into the conversation.

“...doesn’t seem good, whatever it means. Jaskier, do you know what an alarm code A-Q0Q4 means?”

“End of the world, probably,” Jaskier said, tossing the rag onto his desk. “The diamond and steel dragon was an A-Q message.”

“We just got this in from one of our databank sectors. Can you take a look?” Vesemir handed Jaskier the readout, and the artificer retrieved his datareader with one hand.

“Alright, it looks like...oh. Well. That’s not very nice.” Jaskier frowned and stood from the desk, moving to the pneumatic tube station in the office. He selected a green tennis ball with “FURTHER INQUIRY” written on all panels, and sent it through to the reporting sector.

_ Thhhhhhwhunk. _

Jaskier received the detailed alarm message, and his frown deepened. “You’re right, this isn’t good.”

* * *

“How’d Nilfgaard get ahold of an outbound line?” Lambert asked, arms crossed from where he was brooding in the corner of the breakfast nook. The whole team had gathered there as soon as Jaskier had explained what had happened to Geralt and Vesemir.

“We don’t  _ have _ an outbound line, is the thing.” Jaskier sighed and pushed his hand through his hair for the eightieth time that hour. “One of the artifacts was creating some wireless facsimile of an outbound line, and Nilfgaard was able to tap that.”

“How rude.”

“No kidding.”

“Well, I’m going to treat this like a ping. I want you to trace where the receiving source was, and you take Geralt with you to investigate. The rest of the team here will search through the databanks to find what artifact did this,” Vesemir decided, still concerned.

“You mean...out in the field?” Jaskier asked, hardly believing it. He was still grounded from the blanket incident. Geralt was buzzing with excitement, though.

“Yes, out in the field. For now, this is priority one. Suspend the other projects until we’ve found and patched and traced this leak. We’ll start now.”

Vesemir walked out of the room, and there were a few seconds of shocked silence before the entire team bust into motion. Lambert and Eskel were talking so fast it may as well have been in another language, Triss was collecting amulets and pendants from all over the B&B, and Geralt was telling Jaskier he’d get his field gear read to go as soon as he found the location.

Jaskier was luckily able to sit on his butt and tap away at his datareader while the others scrambled around. He drank coffee like it was his lifeline, and pored over countless bytes of metadata, looking for anything, for a clue that could have been overlooked by the splicer.

“Can you find it?” A voice asked over his shoulder. He nearly threw his coffee mug at Yennefer in surprise. He hadn’t even heard her portal in.

“Fuck!” he shouted, clutching the datareader to his chest. “Yes! I can find it! Let me just remove my heart from my throat, thank you!”

“That can be arranged.” Yennefer took a seat across from him. “What do you need?” she asked, full seriousness behind her voice.

“I…” Jaskier swallowed. “Probably a bigger budget to prevent this from happening again, but for now...just time. And clear eyes. Whoever did this was sneaky, they were tricky, but I’m getting somewhere. They were trained in the same place I was.”

“They’re from Oxenfurt?” Yennefer clarified.

“They’re in Oxenfurt?!” Geralt shouted, muffled between floors.

“They’re not  _ in _ Oxenfurt, my love!” Jaskier called. “Oxenfurt is a waypoint for lots of academics and the underground is vast. I couldn’t even be sure if they were from Oxenfurt. I’m certainly not from Oxenfurt.”

“But they were trained there. Was it formal training?”

“Yes. They have stick-up-their-ass Academy flair written all over their work. Oxenfurt grads all use the same shorthands in their splicing. They stick out like a sore thumb. But…”

“But what?” Yen waved her hand and refilled his coffee.  _ Huh. _

“They’re using terms and phrases they never taught in Oxenfurt. They must have gotten some training to get into the warehouse. See, they know to sort by sector, then shelf, then by tag code.”

“Someone’s familiar with artifacts.”

They updated the team over the Farnsworths, knowing that they, at least, were a closed loop that couldn’t easily be tapped. Eskel and Lambert joined the call with goggles on, and Lambert looked like he was covered in some kind of goop. Jaskier elected not to ask about it.

“If they’re from Oxenfurt, and they’re Academy-trained, they’ll have a paper trail in the school databases. They were probably kicked out of a program or two for misconduct.”

“It’s not hard to get a misconduct demerit,” Jaskier said under his breath. “We’ll go over the records we can get our hands on. I know they recently transferred a lot of things to a microfiche machine center so they—”

“Yes yes you’re very smart go do it!” Vesemir hung up on him. Eskel and Lambert saluted them and continued searching for the leak.

“You need to go to Oxenfurt?” Yen said.

“Just a bit.”

* * *

Traveling by portal with Yennefer was a distinctly different feeling than traveling by way of a permanent portal between the B&B and the warehouse. They were both gut-punches of strangeness, to be sure, but Yennefer’s power seemed a bit more...uncontrolled. For all the sorceress put out that she was a badass ice queen, the feeling of her chaos around Jaskier was certainly not feeding that persona.

Geralt still looked a bit queasy as the three of them ran around the Academy campus. What locks couldn’t be picked by Jaskier were broken by Geralt or  _ convinced _ open by a wave of Yennefer’s hand. Class was not in session that day, so they ran into barely anyone as they snuck through the administrative halls.

“Ooh, that musty carpet smell. Got told off so many times with that mold in my nose,” Jaskier reminisced unkindly. A frosted-glass door marked RECORDS opened easily under Geralt’s foot, and repaired itself just as easily by Yennefer’s hand.

The microfilm system was surprisingly easy to splice into. “For a school that prides themselves on being a splice-secure campus, they really don’t put their money where their mouth is, do they?” Jaskier muttered as his hands flew across the processor keys.

“What are you doing?” Geralt asked, keeping an eye on the door.

“Filtering out based on the clues we’ve found. They either graduated from or were kicked out of the data engineer department, have two-to-three demerits against them, and...ha. Look at that. It’s me!”

“You did not splice into our outbound lines.” Yennefer deadpanned.

“Yeah, that’s true. Would’ve been hilarious, though.” He flicked to the next search result. “Valdo Marx, your name is known.”

“What a pretentious-sounding name.”

“He’s a few years older than me, so that’s why I didn’t think of him at first. I remember this incident - he tried splicing his grades higher, and when that didn’t work, he tried to use his father’s money to buy himself a better grade. Threw a huge fit in the courtyard and had to get escorted off the premises by four guards.”

“He might dangerous, if this is the guy.”

“He’s from money, but his father worked in manufacturing, not shipping or anything that would’ve been easily traced back to the warehouse, or warehouse-adjacent activity.” Jaskier looked up at the sorceress.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that whoever trained this guy to get into our warehouse, they’re the ones behind this.”

“Nilfgaard.”

“Bingo.”

“Who’s Bingo?”

“Is Bingo another company like Nilfgaard?”

“Oh my god, no. Just take me back to the B&B before I hurl myself off the belltower.”

* * *

The team gets to work on the new information they found. Eskel was now covered in the same goop Lambert had been covered in before, but the pair both refused to acknowledge it. “I think we found our outbound transmitter. We’ve double-bagged it in some AMFBs, which should stop the transmissions.”

“Good work, what was it?” Vesemir asked.

“Some kind of bell. We found it because it wouldn’t stop ringing. It set off some of the—”

“Nothing. It set off nothing and we need a shower for unrelated purposes.”

“Right.” The group all stared at Eskel and Lambert, goopy as they were.

“So, Valdo Marx. What do we have.”

“His last known location to the school was on campus grounds after he was expelled. That’s most likely when Nilfgaard snatched him up, and trained him to splice into our warehouse.”

“They haven’t been this brash in centuries. They’ve been doing their own collection work, and stayed away from ours for the most part. Why would they want to change their tune now? They know attacking the warehouse would bring down three sorceresses and five witchers on their heads.”

“Five? Three?” Jaskier asked.

_ Zzzzip. _ “I count as both,” Ciri said, walking into the office. “Heard the news. Thought you might need all hands on.”

“Welcome back, Ciri. Yes we’re going to need some help on this one. We’re trying to track down a man named Valdo Marx, he’s a splicer for Nilfgaard, who’s behind the attack on the warehouse that happened last night.”

“Right. I’ll be right back.”

_ Zzzzip. _ She was gone.

“I’m never going to get used to that, am I?” Jaskier wondered aloud.

“Give it a few hundred years, you’ll see stranger.”

_ Right. A few hundred years. Thanks, Vesemir. _

They barely had to wait ten minutes before Ciri  _ zzzzip _ ped back into the B&B courtyard. And this time, she brought a friend.

Valdo Marx was a tall man, and would have been described as lithe and sharp-angled by those who liked him, though to the warehouse agents, he just looked like a scrawny little worm. He had a mop of unwashed hair atop his head, and an unfortunate amount of stubble growing down his neck. Ciri had him by the ear, and was still berating him for being such a creep when they both appeared through the portal.

“I found the little rat bastard,” Ciri said, pulling him along. “We don’t have long, he took some kind of pill the second he saw me, think he’s dying.”

As if on cue, Marx spit blood out on the ground. Triss tutted at the mess. “Your days are numbered, witchers!” he laughed, a little loopy in his poisoned state.

“That’s normally how days are counted, yes.”

“You can’t stop the rising of the black sun. Nilfgaard will prevail over the world, and you’ll see that they’re an unstoppable force. We have amassed an army of tools to use against your like. You will bend the knee to them, and you will be powerless to stop them.”

“He keeps saying stop, why does he think that’s our goal here?” Jaskier muttered.

“You hoard your own tools away like used books, like useless decorations, hidden from the world! Fools, all of you. Fools.” He coughed out more blood, tastelessly staining his shirt. Jaskier made a face. “The world will live under the black sun banner, and you...will be dust.”

He died, rather dramatically. Ciri let his body slump to the ground, a literal dead weight. The agents all looked at one another.

“So that was disgusting and enlightening.”

“Tools. He mentioned tools. You think he means artifacts?”

“What else would he mean? Nilfgaard isn’t a hardware store.”

“I think I may have an inkling of what he meant. But we need to be on our best games for this. Lambert, Eskel, go clean up. Triss, I think we’re going to need a lot of coffee.”

* * *

The breakfast nook looked like a war room.

Maps of the Continent were posted all over the walls, with location pins dotted all over the place in a seemingly uneven manner. Yellow for Nilfgaardian grabs, blue for local grabs. Coffee was distributed in as uneven a manner as the maps, most of it going to Jaskier as he leafed through endless pages of research.

“I’m used to steam burns, not paper cuts,” he complained, kissing away the drop of blood on his thumb.

Trying to deduce an enemy’s plan for world domination was a lot more administrative in nature than any of them had expected it to be. More often than not, it was a legal loophole that allowed for some of the Continent’s most disastrous takeovers, so they were loophole hunting. Nilfgaard was a slippery little bitch about it, though, and had covered their tracks well.

“I think we can all assume that Marx was a rogue agent, and had been burned pretty badly, though he was still inducted into their plans enough to try and take matters into his own hands.”

“That’s certainly a way to describe it. I’m sure most people would just call the bastard crazy and call it a day.” Jaskier sipped his coffee and shared a look with Triss, who agreed silently.

“Regardless, he’s forced both our hands to go for our weapons. If Nilfgaard has artifacts and intends to use them for world domination, we should stop them before they gain any more traction than they do.”

“All they are is traction. They have companies and corporations in every major country on the continent, they’ve probably got their own people in politics and other agents of power, we’re not even sure where their reach ends,” Geralt pointed out.

“We can take away their toys, though,” Ciri said slowly from the edge of the room, looking rather intently at one of the dotted maps. “Should cripple their operation enough that they can’t get it up again for a few hundred years.”

“Ugh, don’t say get it up, you’re a child,” Geralt groaned, covering his ears.

“I’m five hundred years old, I can talk about boners, Geralt.”

The other witchers groaned and adopted the same hear-no-evil position Geralt had.

“Ciri’s right,” Jaskier said.

“Oh, not you too,” Geralt pleaded.

“No, not that part. Well she’s right about that too, but that’s not what I meant. If we take away the means of their destruction, they won’t be able to you know. Take over the world.”

“You mean destroy them?” Lambert said. “Destroying an artifact sets off an extreme amount of energy, it’s like setting off a nuclear fission device on a small scale.”

“We can’t exactly just steal their shit and let them come after us.”

“Okay, you have a point. So destruction. Where do we start for that?”

Vesemir frowned. “Stop talking about the worst case scenario, we don’t have all the facts just yet.” Jaskier looked up at him, confused. “If we go in, swords drawn, they’re going to take down the eight of us no problem. What if Marx was wrong, and they never intended to use the artifacts, and we’re worrying about nothing at all?”

Everyone started shouting over one another then.

“Why would a man lie in his last words?”

“Worrying about nothing at all? They were trying to take Greg!”

“You know the wide reach they have. Just because Emhyr isn’t at the throne anymore doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to stay subtle about their plans.”

“Look at this, they have a financial net that could keep them afloat for years and years and years.”

“Don’t try to tell me I’m wrong, did you see what Greg did to them when they—”

“Stop putting your faith in a deranged monster horse.”

_ “He’s not a horse!” _

Yennefer snapped her fingers, and the room went silent. “We’re not going to figure out their actual intentions just sitting here arguing about them. Let’s say Marx was wrong, and we’re worrying. What’s our next step? They obviously know how to get into our systems, and know us enough to leave a trap we couldn’t see until it was too late. So, what else is true?”

“We don’t know what else is true.”

“So we should go  _ find out what’s true _ then?” Yennefer prompted.

It was then that everyone finally got what she was saying.


	12. #O-3284: First Aid Kit

Four wolves crept along the side of the road leading up to the facility. The sign, a nondescript ‘Guardians Storage’ with a black-sun logo, greeted them. The four kept grim expressions on their faces as they approached, their feet silent on the ground beneath them. Gone were the days of sneaking up on canvas-and-wood tents, of extinguishing fires with a shot of Igni. It was almost a fortress that they were breaking into, and they were all on guard.

At the front, Vesemir gave a hand signal, and the pack dispersed around the perimeter fence. They stayed out of the light, out of range of the guards patrolling it, and waited til they were all in position. Then, in their ears, Jaskier’s voice whispered, “Go.”

They scaled the fences in under a minute, eager to get to the other side and to their second hide point. The guards were none the wiser, continuing their patrol despite the deadly killers now in their midsts. Eskel’s back hit the side of a large cargo crate, sword already silently unsheathed. It wasn’t often that they had to go out and actually  _ use _ their old swords, but the moment Vesemir had suggested it, he’d taken the chance. “Eskel, you’re up. Break the fuse box.”

Over the years spent watching technology bloom and flourish around the Continent, Eskel had spent his own time adapting as well. Signs were still useful and all, but they required a more delicate hand, a more focused mind. He spent many hours deep in meditation, searching for just the right focus to reach out, and search the collective knowledge of the location. A moment later, he instinctively ran forward, his steps sure and direct, carrying him toward the breaker box. Another Sign, a focused and devastating shot of Igni, plunged the whole compound into darkness.

“We’re dark,” Eskel said into the earpiece. “Lambert, your turn.”

“On it.” On the western wall of the compound, Lambert scaled the side of the main guard tower, narrowly avoiding the visual footprint of the surveillance kinetoscopes. He made it to the top, and attached the two fun little toys he and Jaskier had built the night before. One would disrupt radio transmissions until they were gone, and the other was insurance in case something went wrong.

The big-boom, explodey kind of insurance.

“We’re set. Turning back time to three hundred years ago in three, two, one…”

The backup power generators came on, but the radio and signalling equipment remained off.

“I’ll keep watch from up here. Geralt and Vesemir, this is your handoff.”

The White Wolf gave a grunt in response. Vesemir had insisted that he and Geralt take potions along, just some doses of Cat and Blizzard. The bottles they’d found of them were absolutely ancient, predating even the warehouse. The taste was just as bad as they both remembered it being, and it certainly wasn’t a pleasant time.

Geralt was at least glad that Jaskier wasn’t around to see the effects, the toxicity running through his mutated veins, making him look like a monster as well. In another time, in another place, maybe Jaskier would have traveled with him on the Path, doing something probably just as brilliant and well-suited to him, but the witcher he’d grown to become was unable to reconcile the image in his mind.

The last two wolves broke the locks on the main storage facility, and came face to face with what appeared to be a large floor of office cubicles. The fluorescent lights, flickering under the backup generator’s efforts, stung their pupil-flooded eyes. Geralt threw a knife into the nearest light and stalked forward, Vesemir following with a sword drawn.

“I heard a crash, what was that?” Jaskier asked in all their ears.

“Light fixture casualty,” Geralt responded, his voice a rolling growl none of them had heard in a very, very long time.

Jaskier sucked in a breath, like he was going to make some remark, before thinking better of it. Things had been tense since the witchers had set out for the mission.

They were there to break in, find Nilfgaard’s priority recovery list, grab what artifacts they could, and get out. 

Jaskier just hoped it went well, considering the frustration it took to even get them out the door.

* * *

_ Thirty-six hours earlier… _

The B&B had not been quiet in a very long time. Shouts of anger and indignant arguing took place in every room. And like most arguments, it could have been solved with a simple matter of communication, trust, and respect.

Those ships had long sailed from Kaer Morhen, however.

“I don’t know why we have to go through this again. You’re not even  _ listening _ to us!” Jaskier said, trying to be heard over Vesemir sharpening a sword as loud as possible.

“When we started this warehouse, it was with the intention of never using these objects, no matter how little or large the effects or consequences were! We are going to continue doing it that way because that’s what’s worked for four hundred years. And it’s going to work for another four hundred years if I have anything to say about it.” Vesemir rasped the whetstone over the sword again.

“And when someone else changes? When pretty much our only adversary changes those tactics so they can commit atrocities and inspire fear across the Continent to control the populations? What then? Will you still sit on your ways then?” Yen snapped back, not liking this conversation.

“The logic is the same. We know artifacts are too dangerous to wield, and I will not be putting any one of my agents under their influence. That’s final.”

“Not final,” Jaskier and Yennefer said as one.

“I said,” Vesemir stood angrily, throwing the sword down on the ground.  **“That is final.”**

Vesemir never used his Alpha Voice, if he could help it. He considered it to be rude and used by weak people who didn’t know how to compellingly convince others. He was, however, at his breaking point, and was losing all semblance of control and respect by those around him. It was a cheap shot, putting his full power behind it, but his stomach turned with grim satisfaction when Jaskier and Yennefer shut up, paling and bowing their heads.

“Are we understood?”

“Yes, alpha.”

* * *

They didn’t talk about it. The other alphas knew, of course, that Vesemir had given an order and did what he thought had to be done to get that order followed, but it still sat uneasily with the other three. They couldn’t defy him without risking Vesemir’s wrath, so they ignored it, preferring to return to the topic and yell at him after they were all home and the threat had been neutralized.

Geralt read the wall map and hid in the shadows until the frantic guards ran by, eagerly trying to get to the breaker box and fix the power. He heard something about a “neutralizer” going down in Unit F, and ignored it. Anything relegated outside of Unit A was not their concern.

“You have about eleven guards coming at you, Esk,” Lambert said into his comm piece. “Get to higher ground.”

“Trying. Climbing with a sword is fucking stupid.”

Geralt broke the handle on the door to the secure computer facility, and used the auto-splicer Jaskier had made for just this occasion. The keys on the inside whirred and twirled, a bright green light flickering on and off while they waited for access. The softest  _ click-ding! _ from the device indicated their access. “Priority recovery and retrieval lists,” Vesemir reminded him, keeping an eye on the door again.

“This is all in Elder,” Geralt grunted. “Who the fuck still speaks Hen Linge.”

“Eigean,” Jaskier said. “Eigean is necessary, need, must.”

“Quiet. We heard you the first time,” Vesemir snapped.

“Hey.” Geralt glared up at Vesemir. “We’re gonna fucking talk about this. You need to cut it out.”

“Don’t get distracted. Finish the job.”

* * *

_ Thirty hours earlier… _

Jaskier felt shaky and weak after getting Voiced that hard. He sat on the floor in his room, thinking over every possibility, how each one of them could go wrong. They needed to regroup about this, get on the same page. Someone was going to get hurt if they weren’t all cooperating, he knew it. He’d planned and run heist jobs like this before, he had the expertise and he had the know-how to do this right, and there was something telling him this was going to be bad.

A soft knock at his door came from Geralt. He made a weak noise, helpless. Geralt came in and scooped up the omega, putting him in his lap the way he liked to. “Hey, hey, come here, it’s alright.”

Jaskier tried to control his breathing into Geralt’s shoulder, tears falling steadily. He couldn’t even speak, he’d been brought down so hard.

Geralt pet over his back. “I’m so sorry, Jaskier. Once we’re safe, I promise. I promise we’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again. He’s just stressed out, and—”

Jaskier’s hands tightened in Geralt’s shirt, and they were silent.

Whatever thing would go wrong, certainly, Jaskier hoped it didn’t happen to Geralt.

* * *

“Units B and C, I’m sending the tag codes to your wristpieces now. Don’t dawdle.” Jaskier’s fingers flew over the keys, nerves still stealing his breath every few minutes. He didn’t remember a time before this one where he’d been so wracked with worry.

He watched their locations move across the screen, little blips with letters beside them. Lambert’s tracker stayed stationary, while Eskel’s moved lengthwise across a rooftop. Geralt and Vesemir stayed close together as they moved.

Triss was watching the operation bitterly, arms crossed in front of her. Ciri had decided to take no part in it after hearing of what Vesemir did, and Yen paced anxiously in the next room.

“Vesemir, what—” Geralt’s voice cut off at the sound of gunfire, rattling onto the wire. Jaskier’s heart leapt up into his throat, and he almost choked on a cry of despair.

“Shit!” Lambert cursed. “I’m coming down to help.”

“No!” Vesemir said, strained, over the line.

“You’re shot, and we’re pinned down with nothing but swords on our back. Lambert, get us out of here!”

_ “They’re over here!” _ a voice called from a distance. Jaskier looked for routes out of the building, anything he could do to run point, but from his position, miles and miles away, he couldn’t do much more than watch.

“On the move. Fuck, Vesemir, you idiot, stay awake!” Geralt sounded worried, concern bleeding into his voice for the first time since taking the potions. “That much Blizzard and you basically walk into that bullet’s path, you owe me. Fuck!”

Triss and Yen held each other, hands intertwined. Jaskier found his voice. “Do you need evac?”

“That’d be lovely,” Geralt grunted. “We’re on the top floor of—”

“I’ve got them.” Yen’s eyes were almost completely glazed over in white, and her hands glowed purple.

“Hang on. You’re dropping in. Eskel and Lambert, retreat to the—”

_ “AAAGH!” _ Lambert shouted over the wire.

“Lam? Lambert where are you? What happened?”

“My fucking leg…” Lambert strained, a wheeze in his tone. Jaskier felt cold all over.

“Triss?”

Triss had checked out, lost in shock and despair.  _ Fuck. They’re going to die. _

“I’m on it,” A new voice came over the line. There was a  _ zzzzip _ and a screech of the wind as Ciri stepped in, grabbed Lambert, and stepped out, back into the B&B. She was gone again, most likely to retrieve Eskel, but there was a portal opening in the middle of the office ceiling before he arrived. Lambert crawled over to the side, narrowly avoiding getting his already-injured leg crushed under a falling Geralt and Vesemir.

Jaskier stayed on the line until Eskel ran in with Ciri from outside, out of breath and covered in what Jaskier hoped was someone else’s blood. “Lam!” he shouted, falling to his knees and rolling the other alpha over. Jaskier swept to Vesemir’s side, finding the wound easily. It was oozing blood.

“Shit, I need Swallow.”

“Is now the time, Geralt?!” Jaskier shouted incredulously.

“Swallow!” he pointed with a bloody finger at the copper bottle on the desk. Jaskier grabbed it and applied pressure to Vesemir’s midsection, trying to stop the bleeding. Yen was at Lambert’s side, setting the bone without touching him. Triss was still standing in shock.

“Triss!” Jaskier begged, hoping she’d snap out of it. “Triss, we need your help, please!”

She just stared at him in stillness, unmoving, eyes unfocused. Ciri zipped into assistance. “What can I do?” she asked Jaskier.

Jaskier blinked a little, shocked to be asked for direction when it was abundantly clear he  _ wasn’t  _ in charge at the warehouse. “Uh. Geralt, did the bullet go through him?”

Trauma first aid wasn’t Jaskier’s most expert area, but it seemed to him like keeping a bullet inside of a rapidly-healing witcher wasn’t the best idea.

“Yeah, it’s out. Didn’t puncture a bowel, or a lung, fuck we’re so lucky.”

“Not lucky enough,” Ciri snapped at her father, taking over while Jaskier opened the potion bottle. “Give us some room, Geralt. We’ve got it. Go help Eskel.”

Lambert was mostly not screaming by now, the panic having fizzled into that mindless ache of pain that followed every acute injury. Geralt looked stricken. Jaskier didn’t say anything else, needing concentration as he was handed a needle and suture thread for the wound.

They worked in what felt like was slow motion, though it must have taken a matter of minutes to stabilize the regenerative fools in front of them.

Jaskier sat back once Vesemir’s wound started to knit itself together. He looked about forty years older, and hollowed out by the whole experience.

Eskel had taken a limping Lambert back to the B&B, and Yen had transported Vesemir and Triss to a quieter place in the warehouse to recover. The office smelled like blood and tears and alpha panic. Jaskier collapsed back against the desk he’d worried at the whole night.

And then he started to cry.

Ciri sat at his side, and cried with him, while Geralt could only watch and suffer.

* * *

Vesemir woke up the next afternoon, confused and suffering from a potion hangover. It had been the first night in months that Jaskier and Geralt hadn’t slept in the same room as one another. Mignole had arrived sometime in the night and made sure they hadn’t fucked up the procedures all that much, and was sitting and waiting for the old wolf when he blinked his eyes open. “Minnie,” he rasped.

“You…” she cut herself off, looking out the window with her arms crossed. “I hope you know how deeply in the wrong you are right now.”

“What?”

“There is a  _ broken _ family down in the B&B right now. Don’t bother trying to tell me otherwise, I got the story of what you said and did from Yennefer.”

Vesemir waited for the frustration and pride to well up, but it never did, replaced instead by the throbbing ache in his side. He had regretted Voicing the others almost instantly after doing it, and had every chance to apologize for it, but his damned pride didn’t let him, not even once.

“I thought I knew what was best,” he said instead. Mignole’s face fell in disappointment, and that hurt more than the bullet wound did.

“You’re over a thousand years old, Vesemir. It doesn’t make you the smartest person in the room, or the wisest. Why would you sanction this kind of mission without hearing every possible option?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I wanted to find out who had done this to our home, and I wanted to be a step ahead of them for once. We weren’t going to have time if we sat down and talked about it.”

“You’re going to have time, now. Yennefer’s thinking of activating the crystals.”

“What? You mean—?”

“Exploding the warehouse? Yes, Vesemir. They know who raided their facility, they know it was us. You went in with swords strapped to your back, black eyes and black veins, and they recognized you. Pretty much instantly, at that. Now Kaer Morhen, and all of us, have targets on our backs. You can’t brute force your way out of this one, Vesemir. It’ll end with all of us dead.”

When had he missed Mignole’s fire? When had he actively ignored the warning signs, the things he’d trained his pups to always heed? When had he become an old dog with no new tricks? He blinked several times and sat back.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. I’ll tell them you’re awake. Hopefully they don’t kill you before your pride does, Vesemir.”

* * *

Lambert had his leg propped up on a chest, still in a cast from the evening before. Eskel stood behind him, one hand on his shoulder. Geralt and Jaskier stood across the room from one another, not looking but very obviously wishing they could. Mignole stood with Yennefer and Triss in the corner. Triss was a little better, but still had a faraway, distracted look to her eyes that was too sad to look at for too long.

Vesemir sighed, long and loud. “I fucked up.”

No one wanted to be the asshole said “well, yeah,” except for one man, who was already that asshole.

“Well, yeah,” said Lambert. The tension started slipping out of the room. “Why don’t we start from the top and figure out exactly how much you fucked up?”

“I didn’t listen.” Vesemir looked Yen in the eyes. “I talked over those who had perfectly good ideas, and as much experience in the battlefield as I did.” He shifted his eyes to Eskel. “I thought my voice being loudest, being clearest, most powerful, meant I was right, where I was wrong.” He finally looked over to Jaskier. “And I said things and did things that I’d promised I’d never do.”

Jaskier looked pained, his face all red and ruddy from hours of crying, of fitful sleep.

“I didn’t mean to put this rift here. I hope you all can forgive me for doing it anyway. I am sorry.”

“You owe me twenty orens,” Lambert muttered to Eskel, who cuffed the back of his head.

“Thank you, Vesemir. We should have stood up against what we knew was wrong, though.” Geralt spoke up, finally addressing the room. “We were given longer lives, more power, because we were expected to uphold better selves than the monsters we hunted.

“In the beginning, we only had ourselves to rely on, and it’s easy enough to fall back on the old ways, and not adapt, and learn, and become better. We have these gifts, we have the training to do this right. We’ve had to deal with the fallout of the other people, of other monsters, and other artifacts wreaking havoc on those who don’t deserve it.

“Might be time we flip the script, hm?”

* * *

Geralt couldn’t find Jaskier after their meeting, but followed his instincts to their little picnic island. The artificer was sitting beneath the tree, knees drawn up to his chest and still. He hadn’t said anything while they were all in the room together, and it worried Geralt more than he had words for.

“Jas?” he asked, approaching slowly, like one might approach a scared and injured animal.

“What?” Jaskier sighed, defeat clear in his posture, in his tone. Geralt took a seat next to him on the slightly damp grass.

“We wanted to start planning again soon, we couldn’t find you.”

“Why would you need an omega’s opinion on the battlefield?” he said bitterly, his voice catching with emotion. “Figured I’d do everyone better right here, hands-off.”

“Jaskier, don’t say that. You saved Vesemir’s life last night.”

“That doesn’t change anything about me, Geralt. I’m still just an omega. A mortal omega, at that. I don’t have those gifts or the immortality you all share. I don’t have centuries of experience against monsters and strange items, I can’t even lift a sword without putting myself in danger. Why would you need. My. Help?”

Geralt pleaded with his eyes. “Because you do have so much to offer, Jas. You aren’t just an omega. You’re not even just a man. You’re a brilliant artificer who’s been living on his own for half his life, who’s gone on adventures and taken risks and learned from his mistakes. You have friends who love you, you have a family who supports you here. We want to be better. Can you help us be better?”

Tears welled up in Jaskier’s eyes. “I don’t want to get in the way of what you do best.”

“You won’t be in the way. If I get it right, you’ll be by my side.”

* * *

The breakfast nook-turned-war room had their two invalids propped up on one side, already bickering about not having enough elbow room when Geralt and Jaskier walked in. Vesemir looked like he wanted to stand, wanted to speak, but Jaskier waved him off. “Apologize later,” the artificer said.

“Now that we’re all on the same page,” Yennefer began. “Let’s start from square one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please don't be mad at vesemir, his braincells are senile


	13. #S-84-211-007M: Boathouse Matches, Box of Six (6)

They knew time wasn’t on their side. They knew the only things they had on their side were one another, and a vast semi-sentient warehouse full of dangerous artifacts, all of which held the potential energy to render the Continent inert.

Jaskier and Lambert worked as fast as they could on devices while Yennefer and Eskel pored over the catalogs of artifacts, searching for something that could possibly give them an edge.

“Okay. Doorstop that only the placer can pick up?”

“It weighs like forty pounds, I don’t think we can afford carrying that around.”

“Ah! Bicycle that renders one invisible.”

“That one was mis-shelved. It’s actually a unicycle.”

“Fuck.”

Vesemir, Triss, and Mignole all worked on locating the hub for Nilfgaard’s activities. The site they’d crashed and burned at yesterday had been a satellite hub, and only operated at half-capacity, so they had one shot to crack into headquarters and lay their trap.

“Do you think we’ll have enough juice to disperse the power through every satellite hub?” Triss asked.

“Probably not. We might have to get creative about it. I’d rather we not split up like last time. Everyone has eyes on everyone’s backs. I’m not risking anyone’s safety, not again.”

Mignole kept her smile to herself, and pored over the blueprints Jaskier had managed to splice off of the drive.

She spoke up when she found something useful. “Here. That’s the security center that monitors the whole storage operation. That’s their main office.”

Geralt was walking between the three groups, ensuring ample progress was made in each front. He felt his chest swelling with pride, with hope that they may actually win, finally wiping Nilfgaard’s power off the map for good.

He also kept the teams fed, which was almost as important as oversight.

“Lambert, do we...need that many bombs?” he heard as he walked closer to the workshop. Geralt braced himself, expecting the witcher to snap back that more is more when it comes to bombs, but…

“You’re right. We should focus on some kind of pulsar system, render their systems inert, but only a little at a time. That way, they’ll…”

Geralt walked off, satisfied with the teamwork and energy they were putting in.

He heard Yennefer scoff, and raced back up the stairs to the office, knowing what that scoff meant. “I cannot believe our luck,” she said instead of a cutting remark.

“What is it?” Geralf asked, a little out of breath from his panicked run up to the office.

“Boathouse matches,” Eskel and Yennefer said at once.

“The explosive ones? We already have the bombs…” Geralt gestured to the workshop, where even from here, he could hear the gentle noise of Jaskier laughing.

“They’ll probably be expecting that, given that we never really set off Lambert’s insurance policy back in the sat hub,” Eskel pointed out. “But another artifact, with artifact radiation and signatures, among other artifacts?”

“We’d essentially be giving them a taste of their own medicine,” Yennefer finished. “They can take their dumb bell and shove it up their—”

“Right. I’ll go unshelf it. What else do you need?”

“You remember the coins we retrieved from that tomb?”

“Which tomb.”

“...”

“...oh, that tomb.”

* * *

There was one member of the warehouse that hadn’t been there for the proceedings, but she arrived with a  _ zzzzip _ and a leftovers box of Zerrikanian noodles, looking only slightly hungover from daydrinking on the other side of the Continent. “What’d I miss?” Ciri asked when she saw the state of the breakfast nook.

Mignole looked at Vesemir. Vesemir looked at Triss. Triss looked at Ciri. Ciri looked at her box of noodles.

She definitely wasn’t going to have time to finish these.

The three debriefed her as quickly as possible, while she got out of her “clubbing” clothes and into her “ass-kicking” clothes, which were the same clothes, with different boots.

Geralt had never been more proud of his daughter.

* * *

“Alright, squawk when you hear your name,” Vesemir said into the microphone at his desk. Lambert monitored the telemetrics on the analytical engine, which had a tap into the communications portal for Nilfgaard, which Jaskier had cracked basically seconds before they stepped through the portal and into Nilfgaard City.

“Eskel.”

“Squawk.”

“Ha ha. Very funny. Geralt.”

“Sounding off.”

“Yennefer.”

“Yeah.”

“Jaskier.”

“Loud and clear.”

“Triss?”

“Receiving.”

“Ciri.”

“Got you.”

“Mignole?”

“I prefer Doctor.”

“Really?”

“No. I’m here.”

“Alright, let’s get ready for—”

“GREG, ACKNOWLEDGING.”

“...Thank you, Greg.” Vesemir sighed. Lambert was crying tears of laughter, having never heard Vesemir’s voice sound so joyful and excited in all his life, and the minute he had, he couldn’t look at the old swordmaster the same way again.

“Alright, go ahead and split into your teams. Entry point goes to whoever gets the flag code first. You know what to do. Go do semaphore, wolves.”

“I feel like we should howl, don’t you?” Jaskier joked, breaking out into a run next to Yennefer. They looked the part, dressed in all black with pieces of tactical storage all over their bodies.

“If you value your life, don’t,” Yen said, in that aloof tone that he could never quite tell was her being serious or not. Jaskier just swallowed his remark and kept running.

Geralt, paired with Doctor Mignole, kept his head on a swivel, watching their tail for anything suspicious. He knew he was one of the more recognizable and inconspicuous of the group, which was why he had the top hat.

(A delivery driver passing by saw an old lady running at break-neck speeds down the thoroughfare, and almost crashed into a lamp post.)

Eskel and Triss were nearly to the front of the facility, ready to brute-force distract while everyone else slipped in quietly from the other sides.

“Hey, you Nilfgaardian?” Triss said, not slowing at all as she aimed for the front-door man. 

“Uh, what—?!” The guard had barely a second to react before all 160 pounds of sorceress dove head-first into his gut, pummeling him with small, delicate hands, made strong from baking and hidden rage.

“What the fuck, Marigold, oh my god.” Eskel pulled her off of the unconscious guard and helped her inside, tossing the makeshift pulsar devices to the kinetoscopes on the door. “We’ve gained entry. Time to make some noise.”

“Release the hounds, sweetheart,” Lambert cooed into the comm line.

“Save it for later, pup,” Vesemir sighed.

Eskel and Triss unloaded the mini Ventrilocasts and rolled them down the halls. The toy dogs they were attached to activated, and they took off, causing a racket from every corner at once. They were all singing one of Greg’s songs, which they managed to record over the many silly hours spent refining his communicator.

_ Sometimes when we avenge _

_ All the black-suns die _

_ And sometimes when we avenge _

_ We have a steak that night _

_ Greg is the best Greg _

_ Roach is the best Roach _

_ And Roach will not avenge _

_ Nor shall she be avengered! _

It repeated like that for hours after they released the hounds.

The not-horse himself was currently climbing the side of the building, a strange sight to anyone looking. One person who was not looking was Ciri, who had her eyes shut tight against the spectacle and was clinging to Greg for dear life. “Greg can hear song!” the communicator squawked in Vesemir’s voice.

“Yes, it’s a lovely song, isn’t it?” Ciri squeaked. One of Greg’s eyes kept focused on her, and at least four of the others were watching their path up to the top.

“We’re in the security bank,” came Jaskier’s voice in a hushed tone.

“Why are you whispering?” Geralt asked, coming off sounding like a little old lady.

“Because there’s an alligator in the control room.”

“Why is there a—”

“Yennefer, did you turn someone into an alligator? That wasn’t in the plans.”

“Why would I not let myself have fun while saving the world?”

“Alright, fair. Can you at least get the alligator out of there so Jaskier can start Phase 2?”

“Fine.  _ Come here, sweetheart, come to mommy.” _

“Jaskier is she talking to the alligator like that?”

“I’m being glared at and cannot answer that question.”

“Right. Godspeed, o great artificer.”

“Thanks, Vesemir.”

Jaskier’s auto-splicer only went so far. The man himself had many more tricks up his sleeves than could fit into three bytes of memory.

“Alright, I’m into the—oh fuck, oops.”

“Oops?!” came eight responses.

“It’s fine! It’s a little oops. We’ll reap the consequences later, if we live. Alright, I’m seeing...six storage sites. Coordinates for number one…” Jaskier read off the target coordinates in as clear a tone as he could muster, but the alligator was looking at him from Yennefer’s arms, and he was admittedly a little off his game as a result. 

“Pulling imagery,” Lambert said. “Got it. Regroup with Ciri and Greg.”

“Greg can fly, Green One knows.”

“Greg, please, please do not fly right now.”

Eskel and Triss punched their last guards and went for the express elevator, taking them up to the roof. Mignole helped old-lady Geralt up the stairs. Jaskier wrapped up his splicing, exporting the viruses to the network nodes without any further delay. They met up with Triss and Eskel in the elevator.

“So what was oops?” Eskel asked, about sixty floors later.

“Muscle memory. Didn’t realize my reflexes were so...klepto.”

“That makes somehow less sense.”

“We’ll talk about it later. I’ve got the imagery. Sorceresses, you ready for portals?”

“We’re ready.”

The seven human-shaped people on the roof gathered around Yennefer. Mignole pulled out the book of Boathouse matches, and gingerly passed them to everyone else in the group.

* * *

It’s important to note here for anyone confused that sorceresses do not simply conjure portals out of thin air. It’s an incredibly complex procedure which requires lots of concentration, an insane amount of skill, and the right conditions to produce a strong and reliable portal. The permanent portals set up at the warehouse and the bed-and-breakfast only operate that well and that consistently because of the latent mesmeric field effect of both locations. And also another secret, but you don’t need to know that yet.

Ciri and Greg had figured out after his hibernation that whenever he zapped the sorceress’ power, it was stored as latent chaos. Greg’s earlier mentioning of feeding solely off of the chaos of the universe was just a little bit of an overstatement. Chaos is, at its core, chaotic, and does strange things to strange animals’ digestive systems. In simple terms, if Greg didn’t shit out the chaos, the chaos would start to consume him back. Like pineapples.

And Greg had not shit out chaos in quite some time.

Back when Ciri had first thought about her Nilfgaardian heritage, she did what any 30-year-old former and future royal heir would do: she scoped the place out. The City of Golden Towers had fortunately not been up to her standards, nor her general aesthetic, and she decided that the southern throne “wasn’t for her.” However, one thing she did remember about the city was its strange concentration of chaos in specific places of importance. Some people would call these Leylines, and they’d be right in saying so; though that’s more of an Earth thing than a Continent thing.

Where the Nilfgaardian artifact-storing headquarters sat was at a cross-section of several of these concentrations, and as such served as a source of pure chaos for the sorceress Yennefer of Vengerburg to draw from. She had to open up six different portals to six completely different locations inside of six very well secured warehouses full of countless amounts of very potentially dangerous artifacts, giving off countless amounts of very potentially dangerous chaos. It was a feedback loop from hell, essentially.

The end of that feedback loop came in the form of Greg. With what was essentially an open firehose of chaos, Yennefer would have definitely disintegrated under her own power without some kind of chaos-zapping anchor. Luckily, they already knew one of those, and he wanted to stretch his limbs, and climb a building.

Let’s see, is there anything else confusing happening right now? Oh right, Geralt was an old lady.

The latent chaos of this location was a double-edged sword. On one hand, they had an abundant amount of power to draw from and build off of and hide their own activities with. On the other, slightly more explodey hand, bringing in a pack of highly-volatile Boathouse matches to that situation would’ve ended in tears.

And this was why an inconspicuous, little old lady had to carry these super-bombs up to the Zeppelin landing pad. The chaos was essentially tricked into writing off Geralt as a non-threat and probably thought Geralt had some hard candies in his knitted cardigan. Which he did, but that’s beside the point.

* * *

Lambert described the locations of each of the satellite hubs to the Yennefer, who was in charge of creating the portals. He was as detailed as he could possibly be because none of them had ever been to one of these locations before. That was another thing about chaos, you couldn’t know what you didn’t already know to begin with, let alone create a portal to that thing that you didn’t know. The rest of the group remained quiet, which was probably hardest for Greg.

He had heard his song playing on every floor on the way up, after all. Greg was a star.

All at once Yennefer held out her hands and cast the portals open. Floating pits of black-velvet void appeared from what was seemingly nothing, though we all know portals cannot be created from thin air itself. “Portals ready,” Yennefer said, straining a little under having to hold open six by herself.

“Group 1, strike ‘em and drop ‘em!”

Jaskier, Mignole, and Eskel did as told, and dropped their lit matches into the portals, a moment before they closed.

“Away,” Jaskier breathed, shaking with nerves.

“Group 2, do your thing.”

“Can you be serious for two seconds, Lambert?!” Vesemir crackled over the line.

Geralt, Triss, and Ciri lit their matches and dropped them in. They snapped shut, and there was a still, uneasy silence.

“Greg stomach avenged Greg…”

“How do we know if it worked?”

The group stared at one another in uncomfortable silence. Eskel looked like he was about to pop a vein in his forehead, and coughed, “The coins,” to Geralt.

It took the White Wolf several seconds to realize what Eskel meant, but when he did, he reached into his other pocket of his knitted cardigan, and pulled out two gold coins.

They were fairly interesting-looking, for coins. Each side had either a skull or a pelvis embossed on its surface. All of the Witchers thought this was hilarious, because growing up they did not play heads or tails, they played heads or tailbones. No one else got the joke, but it’s fairly difficult to describe witcher humor in the first place.

The interesting thing about these coins was that when somebody would rub both of them together, they would produce a sound that could not be re-created by any instrument or any voice on any planet. This frequency and the pitch of the coins’ music was enough to induce an Oracle-type vision. Geralt rubbed the coins together, concentrating on the six locations they’d dropped explosives into, and nearly dropped the coins in shock.

“What is it? What did you see?” Jaskier asked.

“Uh. The matches worked. I think we’ll be feeling the aftershocks of the explosions fairly soon.”

As if mother nature herself was waiting right on cue, the ground beneath the building that they stood upon began to shake. They grabbed one another to stay upright, but they knew staying on top of this building would only end in death.

If there was one thing to say that would criticize the group’s entire operation, it would be this: in all honesty, they had no idea what they were doing after they dropped the matches.

Luckily, they had a Greg.

“What do we do? We can’t portal out of here, it’s too volatile!” Triss said, trying to hold onto Eskel while the building swayed.

“Parachute?” Jaskier tried, though they all knew even a parachute would not save them from the debris.

“Wait!” Ciri said. “Greg said he can fly.”

Normally, this was the point where one or all of them said something along the lines of “this is not the time for whatever Greg said,” but seeing as the options were either to trust a monstrous, six-armed thirteen-eyed, not-horse or death, they all found themselves to be believers.

“Sit on Greg!” Vesemir’s voice said. Those who could not fit on Greg’s back were held in his arms, and together, the entire group hurled itself off the side of a seventy-floor building with little to no screaming at all.


	14. Warehouse Report #R-14886: the Nilfgaard City Incident, and Subsequent Curiosities

_ Three months later… _

Jaskier clinked his wine class against Geralt’s, enjoying the sunset over their newly-acquired winery in Toussaint. More often than not, every member of the warehouse’s staff found themselves locked in a shocked state, wondering “how did I get here” and “is this real” multiple times a day.

I’m happy to report that it was real, and entirely so.

However, the matter of how they got to their happy ending was still a matter of debate among those involved. They knew, on one hand, that they had survived jumping off of a seventy-floor building in the middle of enemy territory on the back (or in the arms) of a very strange...Greg. On the other hand, what happened right after that had to be seen, seen again, seen in several increasingly-frightening dreams, and then seen once more, to be believed.

But I think you’ll all believe me when I just tell you what happened.

* * *

_ Three months prior, in fact… _

They were falling. They were holding onto a not-horse like it would save them, and they were falling because the not-horse told them he could fly.

Do you remember when I told you about the latent chaotic energy that Greg subsisted mainly off of? Greg had been a very, very constipated not-horse on the top of the building that night, and the chaos he’d been consuming off of Yennefer’s pull was the equivalent of a very cheesy, very bready dish.

When the coins had rubbed together, that had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or rather, it was the last bit of resistance Greg’s body had to “releasing” some of that chaos back into the universe. When all seven human-shaped beings climbed up onto Greg, he leapt.

What happened after that is what broke the seven human-shaped beings’ minds.

About thirty stories from imminent death, Greg let out the longest, loudest fart that had ever been ripped on the Continent. It streamed out from behind his glorious ass like a fucking rainbow. The force of the chaos had been so much that it actually propelled the entire group at speeds untested on the Continent before then. None of Greg’s passengers were focused on the records and laws of physics they were all breaking, however, because they were all too busy screaming in confusion.

Greg’s fart ended somewhere above Kaedwen, in a gentle excretion that still held the same shimmery qualities of the fart. He walked it off, feeling much better overall, while the others stared up at the stars over Kaedwen in shock and awe.

* * *

_ The present… _

Sometimes it’s best if you just forget things like that, you see. Jaskier sipped the wine and leaned over his mate’s shoulder, kissing the mark on his neck before taking another sip of the wine. He marveled aloud at it. “This is damn good wine.”

“It’s stolen, of course it’s damned good,” Vesemir remarked, in his cups just the same. He was wearing not even an inch of leather on his body. He wasn’t even wearing shoes. He preferred to walk through the fields with just the dirt under his toes. Mignole said he had gotten exceptionally poetic in his retirement. He’d learned to just not and say “yes, dear,” instead of arguing about it.

It was hard for all of them to find just about anything to argue about, in fact.

“Is it stolen if I only actually stole the deed to the winery?” Jaskier pointed out.

Now, this was also a moment of great confusion for the other agents.

* * *

_ Three months prior, once more, but about an hour before the whole fart business… _

“Alright, I’m into the—oh fuck, oops.”

Jaskier looked at the automatic response from the splice machine.

_ Accounts frozen. Glacier protocol shifted to on-shore shells in KMWH. _

When taking over the world, dear readers, it’s important to have your fingers in as many pies as possible, so that when it comes time to serve one of those pies to those you intend to poison, you have back-up pies to poison later.

It’s really a funnier joke if you’ve taken over the world at least once, I promise.

Nilfgaard had been an empire, and as such did have accounts with the Vivaldi banking family, but they also had enough money in off-shore Skellige bank accounts to start everything again from the ground up.

Jaskier, when he had been working for the mobsters and underworld of Oxenfurt, had become quite adept (and bored) at splicing into bank accounts, freezing those bank accounts, and draining them dry into a specific bucket, so to speak. As such, on his auto-splicer drives, something called ‘glacier protocol’ was invoked pretty much as a second thought, while he used his time in others’ systems doing better things, like replacing all of their financial data with clever puns and rather crass poetry.

When Jaskier had spliced into the security banks at Nilfgaard’s headquarters, he had been so surprised by the alligator that he’d invoked glacier protocol on all of Nilfgaard’s holdings across (and off-shore from) the Continent, draining them into several hundred untraceable accounts at the stroke of a key.

So yes, “oops” was right.

* * *

_ Now _

“I choose to deny all knowledge of my involvement regarding the folding and subsequent earth-salting of Nilfgaard,” Jaskier declared, sitting down on Geralt’s lap.

“You’re cute when you’re being contrarian, did you know that?” Geralt said into Jaskier’s neck, kissing over their mating mark.

“I’m always cute, you’re the one who needs a reason to tell me.”

“That’s disgusting. Are we like that?” Lambert asked Eskel, drinking his wine straight from the bottle like an absolute heathen.

“Yes,” said the entire group.

“You’re louder than they are.”

“If you don’t like the song of our love, you can move out,” Lambert said cheekily.

“If you forget, we’re all technically in the doghouse right now,” Yen said, taking in the last rays of sun as it drifted over the horizon. She lit the outdoors candles with a wave of her hand.

“I don’t want to go check. Someone else check.”

“Triss I think it’s your turn to look,” Geralt said quickly. “I looked last time.”

“I don’t want to check either!” Triss groaned, before picking up the coins off of the table.

The others on the patio watched as she steadied herself with a deep breath, closed her eyes, and rubbed the coins together. Almost instantly, she retched and threw the coins as hard as possible. The others were beside themselves with laughter, watching her choke and try to drink away what she saw through the coins.

“Don’t be like that, if you don’t like the song of the warehouse’s love, you can move out,” Vesemir said, rather pleased with his joke.

“Gross!”

* * *

Deep in the Blue Mountains of Kaedwen lay an old keep. She was over ten centuries old, and it showed in some places more than others, but she was a keep, and keeps kept things safe. Four hundred years ago, Kaer Morhen sat alone, built into the side of a very cold mountain, but one day, a very old witcher brought a very old box of garters into the keep on accident, and little by little, she started to wake up.

Some items the witchers brought her woke her up more than usual. Bringing in Aretuza, for example, was rather shocking to the old castle. I mean, she already  _ was _ a castle. To have  _ another _ castle inside of her? That was just unheard of. And rather immodest, if Kaer Morhen had anything to say about it.

She didn’t, because she was a building with no mouth, but she communicated with her residents in other ways. The smell of apples, for those she liked. Moving pens and books around, for those she didn’t.

And then, one day, a door had been made in the warehouse, and it led to the most fascinating place the warehouse had ever seen. All the old castle had seen of it for a very long time was a bright and sunny hallway, with a carpet runner and some paintings on the walls. It was notoriously difficult for anyone to see through a portal, let alone trying to be a whole-ass castle and looking through one.

That first day, the castle sent over a tentative  _ hello _ to the other building.

The building, like most, did not reply, but Kaer Morhen was patient. Every day, after every witcher and sorceress (and later, artificer) walked through the portal connecting her to the B&B, she would say  _ hello. _

When the matches had dropped into those six unfortunate other warehouses across the Continent, the B&B had given a very pleasant,  _ hello, are you still looking for a mate? _

When the group had returned to the B&B, haggard and mentally exhausted from their entire goddamned ordeal, they heard their house...making noises.

When they got closer, they were able to see various...shapes...inside of the B&B. Vesemir and Lambert had explained the situation, sitting on the back steps as they were, and looked rather done with the entire experience as well.

Beyond the point of caring, the whole group camped in the garden, listening to the sounds of two buildings fucking not fifty feet away.

* * *

“I think it’s time we went to sleep,” Mignole suggested, though when it came to bedtime, it was never a suggestion.

“Yes, dear,” Vesemir said, standing with some effort and walking inside. The others bade them a good night, and relaxed, shifting closer around the bonfire.

Vesemir had recovered generally well from his injury, as much as any thousand-year-old witcher could recover from being shot in the gut. Mignole had suggested it was perhaps time for him to retire, to which he’d thought about long and hard, and conceded with a “yes, dear”. He’d been living in comfort ever since.

Well, he’d been living in comfort ever since they realized they’d “acquired” a winery in Toussaint. He claimed that he was just “letting” the others stay at “his” villa, but in all truthfulness, he was afraid to let them go back up into the mountains too soon. They were all he’d ever known, and to have a mid-whatever crisis this late in age was a bit scary for the old swordmaster.

The others were secretly fond of him as well, luckily.

“Peace at last,” Eskel sighed, taking another drink.

“Do you think…” Lambert cut himself off before his ridiculous mind could get away from him. “Nah, probably not.”

“What?” Ciri asked. “What is it?”

“You’ll all yell at me and tell me it’s disrespectful and gross if I tell you.” Lambert pouted, clearly wanting to tell everyone anyway.

“Well, is it disrespectful and gross?” Jaskier asked.

“I mean, yeah.”

“Ugh, fine. What does your disgusting mind have to say.”

“Do you think...the warehouse and the B&B...this is a two-part gross, bear with me. Do you think they were the mates Ciri had her vision about?”

The group sat and looked into the fire, considering it despite their various states of inebriation. One by one, they all seemed to shrug and nod.

“Seems plausible. Can’t check til we’re back, though.”

“What was the other part?”

“Ya think the warehouse ‘rearranged the floor plan’ of the B&B, so to speak?”

“Okay, you’re actually the worst, Lambert.” Triss stood.

“That’s fucking disgusting, why do you think of things like that?” Yen took her mate’s hand, and walked off with her. Before they could slip away, she looked back at Lambert and mouthed “you’re so right”.

Lambert gave a grin of victory and laughed aloud. “What would you lot do without me? You’d be very very bored.”

“I’d have a calm and uncursed mind, that’s for sure,” Geralt said into his wine.

“I’d have a much lonelier life,” Eskel said, forlorn and completely serious and sappy.

“Okay, go sing the song of your love in your own room,” Jaskier groaned, waving them off. 

He was alone with his mate, and one of his best friends on the entire Continent then. Ciri sang an old song over the flames, the magic in her words causing the sparks to dance in tempo. Geralt was watching her curiously, hearing the spell, the blessing behind the words. “Ciri, what are you doing?” he asked his daughter.

“I figured you’d want a wedding gift. Nothing you could hold or possibly drop, but something that would go with you everywhere.” She drank again from her wine bottle, sniffing away the emotions that had gathered in her throat.

“What’s going on?” Jaskier asked, confused and definitely too drunk to pick up on whatever was happening.

“Ciri just blessed you.”

“Did I sneeze?”

Geralt laughed and held him closer. “No, she blessed you with  _ magic.” _

Jaskier was quiet for a bit, his thoughts not so much as turning in his head as flopping from one side to the other. “Do I have to give you my firstborn child?” he asked, very seriously.

Father and daughter laughed aloud.

“It wasn’t that kind of blessing.” Ciri said, a wobbly, watery smile coming to her face. “I sang you a song borne of the elves, of my ancestors. They were blessed with long life, but only through knowing and loving one another. When they wed, they would renew their love through song, and therefore renew their long lives.”

“Ciri gave you a hundred years per word, and a thousand more by every verse.” Geralt whispered.

“You—?” Jaskier blinked openly at her, tears welling in his eyes as they cascaded down her own face. She nodded.

“I want you here, with us, for as long as you’ll have us.”

“Oh,” Jaskier sobbed, beyond words. He leapt up and pulled Ciri into his arms, kissing her cheek and hugging her as tight as he could. “Thank you, thank you so much.”

They grinned at each other and held tight to their family. Ciri eventually retired back to her room alone, but didn’t mind leaving Geralt and Jaskier to their own devices.

Before she went to bed, however, she snuck out into the rows of grapes, and looked around, enjoying the dirt beneath her toes with a smile. The air was rife with magic, here, that same spice of potential that hid within every artifact. Perhaps that was why the wine was so good, because magic and chaos grew from every grape, and every leaf.

The sound of hooves coming up behind her made her turn and look.

Thirteen eyes looked back at her, and six hands fidgeted a little. Greg had never gotten the hang of what to do with his hands, after all.

“Hello, Greg,” Ciri said with a smile.

“Green One,” Greg greeted, bobbing his head in hello. “Greg had a question to ask.”

“Oh? What is it?”

“When...When Soft and Green One met Greg, after avenging, Greg was scared. Was...Green One scared?”

Ciri was shocked. Even in just the three months of hanging out with a bunch of human-shaped beings, Greg had caught on to lots of nuance in conversation, and was showing more signs of self-awareness than he ever had before.

“I… to be truthful, I was terrified. There’s nothing I’ve ever seen in hundreds of years that’s like you, Greg.”

“Oh, Greg is flattered. Thank you. But…” His communicator wasn’t quite at the point of being able to convey tones of voice, certainly not the way he’d been able to with hand-to-head communication, but Ciri could certainly feel the trepidation and nervousness coming off of the not-horse.

“What is it?”

“Are you...still scared...of me?”

Ciri’s face softened into a smile, and she stepped forward into the surprised hold of Greg’s many arms, hugging him close. “Not at all. You’re my friend, Greg. You’re all of our friend. And we would protect you to the very last breath.”

Slowly, arm by arm, Greg hugged Ciri back.

“You do not scare Greg anymore either, Green One.”

There was a shout from back at the house. They ignored it for hugging purposes.

Back on the patio, Jaskier had just informed Geralt that his own heat would be starting the next morning.

* * *

Working for the warehouse at Kaer Morhen was a bit of a bad trip, at times. Of course, all the witchers had seen and experienced everything under the sun and moon and stars, but there were a few things that took them on the back foot.

Like finding an entire town had been transformed into a giant bowl of marshmallows. That marshmallow bowl had grown sentience and started attacking Eskel and Geralt, who reacted on instinct, and cooked the whole thing with a combined shot of Igni, somehow inventing toasted marshmallows out of pure fear.

There was the taxidermy shop in Kerack with animals that could come alive at night, thanks to a vitality-boosting glue the taxidermist used on all their pieces. The taxidermist, of course, had not mentioned anything about the reanimated animals upon their death, but Lambert and Ciri had very much wished they had.

There was the pocketwatch Jaskier refused to even be in the same room as.

The time that Dandelion’s lute went missing from Dasha sector, Geralt was in an absolute  _ state _ until they found it again. Jaskier had been teaching himself to play on it when he had a few hours free.

“What’s the downside of the artifact? Am I going to die? Grow another head? Do both in that order?” the artificer had asked frantically.

“No,” Geralt had assured him. “No, this is one of the few things in the warehouse that actually  _ aren’t _ cursed, enchanted, or otherwise. It belonged to a friend. When he died, oh hundreds of years ago, now. He took with him so many songs and memories I wish I could have traded for another day with him.”

It would have been very easy for Jaskier to get jealous of this long-dead bard friend of Geralt’s, but they’d grown a lot in the time they’d been together, and as Geralt said, life was too short to not make friends with people, to keep them apart simply because they could die at any moment. Jaskier took the lute back to their room that night, and it’s been there in a place of honor ever since.

There was the entire ordeal of the overhaul of the reporting system at the warehouse, which, in turn, led to the discovery of several baby warehouses growing in the basement of the B&B. The team was both horrified and delighted by their little warehouse nieces, and Lambert had to actually start watching his mouth around what they all referred to as “the children”.

(Lambert had been, unfortunately, right, and the interior design of the B&B  _ had _ changed as a result of its  _ coupling _ with the warehouse. Luckily, this meant the walls were thicker, and the kitchen was larger, much to everyone’s delights.)

Roach and Greg, luckily, never had children, partly because Greg was a little too shy for that kind of thing, and partly because Roach was too much of a free spirit to settle down with one non-horse for the rest of her immortal life. Roach, of course, had no concept of immortality, and as a result, always thought to herself, “what monster are we hunting today?” whenever she saw Geralt. Jaskier made Roach a communicator as well, luckily using the voice of no one that had or ever would work at the warehouse.

Jaskier almost won a fistfight against the grandfather clock in the office. The clock was still undefeated, and right twice a day.

In retirement, Vesemir looked so much better. He’d gotten somehow even worse at jokes, and had written several books about a “mysterious boathouse full of strange tools and stranger people.” They were selling quite well in Oxenfurt. Whenever someone would ask where he got his inspiration, he’d tell them in no uncertain terms, “from keeping my damned eyes open”. 

No one ever really got to the bottom of  _ where _ Jaskier’s warehouse on Marketship Street had gone, besides, of course, the agents who saw it every day. The empty lot where it had been before remained untouched for years, until a gentrification movement in the area paved over the entire street and built...a warehouse.

The warehouse got a cat, who wandered around and hissed at things it decided were not to be respected. It knocked off every fifth item on random shelves, and they named it Vesemir. His nine lives seemed to last much longer than anyone else ever gave it credit for, but what’s a few years to a handful of immortal detectives-slash-hoarders?

Nilfgaard never rebuilt from the devastating loss of their storage facilities, and the areas surrounding said storage facilities only started growing trees again after three hundred years.

Jaskier still stole things from time to time when the mission called for it, because sometimes it made life infinitely easier to have a former cat burglar on the payroll. Lambert picked up some of his skills, but there were some secrets he just couldn’t bear to impart on another.

(“Am I as bad as that taxidermist who didn’t tell anyone they were reanimating stuffed bears?” he’d asked Geralt one night. Geralt, having almost no idea what he was talking about, rolled over and muttered a half-asleep “yes, dear,” which proved the exception to Vesemir’s rule.)

It kept him limber, which his noodle-limbed alpha lover always loved to see, when the moment was right. They began, ended, and interspersed each part of their days with one another. They knew that no matter the year on the calendar, no matter the places they had to explore in order to investigate a ping, they would have one another.

Ciri was happy with being an only child, thankfully.

When he found another person trying to splice into the warehouse (or “hack” as they insisted on calling it these days), he let them get a little deep before cutting them off and tracing their location.

Perhaps he needed an assistant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S FUCKING DONEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA


End file.
